Calendar
Network
Feeds
- 23
- Sphinn It!
Rant about optimizing dynamic websites
Last Monday on my radio show Strikepoint on WebmasterRadio.FM I gave a rant about one of my deep and long-time passions: SEO’ing dynamic websites. It wasn’t that long a rant and actually a good one (for once some might say), so I’d like to repeat it here.
So here we go …
I am sick and tired of seeing CMS, eCommerce providers and even some SEO-firms advertise that they have the perfectly “search engine friendly” publishing system when in fact all they did was to do a simple, and often pretty lame, rewriting of URLs.
Sorry guys, simple or bad rewriting of URLs does not constitute a “search engine friendly” publishing platform. Not even close!
It takes a great deal more for a publishing system to be truly search engine friendly. And that’s only the first step. Next step is to add tools and features that will actually help you getting better ranked. Being friendly – being able to get indexed, is not enough!
First of all rewriting is not always the right thing to do. Especially, if the way you are planning to rewrite will create a ridiculously deep directory structure and too long file names with extreme use of hyphens. Sometimes a simple parameter and ID is much better.
Also, when you do rewrite remember to 301 the old, un-rewritten, URL’s to the new rewritten ones! Did you remember that? Good, because 90% of CMS vendors don’t!
What about all the other duplicate issues that is often found on a dynamic website – multiple versions of URL’s pointing to the exact same pages? To be search engine friendly they have to all be solved.
And then comes all the other indexing barriers that can be found on dynamic websites. The list is virtually infinite. Most of you probably know the majority of them.
The funny thing is, that every time I analyze a large dynamic website (and sometimes even the smaller ones) I find that the programmers have creatively invented new ways to keep the spider out, or trap them in endless loops.
I have yet to find one single CMS, eCommerce, blog or forum system – well any kind of dynamic web-publishing system, that have no indexing barriers at all. So how can you call your systems “search engine friendly”. It’s not. Its crap!
And even if you could dig up some obscure CMS that actually do not have any indexing barriers (could off course be out there somewhere) I bet you there won’t be the kind of optimization tools I’d like to see.
So please, to the world of CMS and eCommerce vendors, please stop advertising your systems as “search engine friendly” until they actually are!
Rant over … :)
5 Comments
Comments
Now I understand why most CMS is such crap and none of the providers care to do better. Even this article get no attention LOL
I hear you. Did this rant occasionallybut to no avail. Most code monkeys are not SEO-compatible. Not to speak of designers ...
you are right w.r.t CMS systems...
I have recently looked at a CMS where all the article, blog, and news URLs contained a parameter that counted the total number of articles on the site.
That parameter fed back in to the script to help build the -- First - Previous - Next - Last -- navigation links. There was never a need to have that as a parameter.
What that now means is every time they publish a new article, new blog entry, or new news item, that the URL of every page of the site is changed.
Google already has multiple URLs for every page, but isn't changing them to the newest forms, as the old ones continue to work.
"What about all the other duplicate issues that is often found on a dynamic website – multiple versions of URL’s pointing to the exact same pages? " could you explain this further. thanks