Dynamic URLs In The Eyes Of A Search Engine - Another Example
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Let me present another example of one of the pages from our corporate Web site. The following URL is a page that contains the full RustyBrick client list. The URL reads as follows: http://www.rustybrick.com/portfolio_client_list_all.php. We also have enabled the Web visitor to sort the client list by industry. If a Web visitor would like to see all clients that fall within the industry of IT & Communication services they would be shown a URL that reads http://www.rustybrick.com/portfolio_client_list.php'industry=4. We again see the question marks and equal signs. Now the Web visitor wants to view the client list by the Retail and Wholesale service industry and clicks on that link. The URL now reads http://www.rustybrick.com/portfolio_client_list.php'industry=6. As you can see the URLs are exactly the same up until the last digit in the URL where the numbers come in. So if RustyBrick severed 200 industries there would be the same URL except for the last digit.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a search engine. The search engine wants to only put pages into its index that are unique. So the full client list contains the same information that the industry specific URLs contain and search engines do not want repetitive information in their index. Search engines decide to combat this issue by "pruning off" the URLs after a specific number of variable strings (i.e. ', =. &).
For example, the URL http://www.rustybrick.com/portfolio_client_list.php'industry=6 might be pruned down to http://www.rustybrick.com/portfolio_client_list.php by the search engine in order to limit the number of repeated content.
In a case like Freshpair.com, where there are numerous methods of finding the same product and with an unlimited number of pages, how do we get the search engine to find each product and each method of finding that product' Search engines want to keep the number of pages that a site contains to a minimum in order to (1) eliminate duplicate search results with the same content and (2) to make the crawling of the pages efficient.
Next: Solution >>
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