Purpose of Friendly URLs

[rp]

is the main purpose for friendly URLs for the spiders to crawl through the site since it doesn't require a call to the MySQL server or is it just to make it easier for visitors to navigate to a URL since it is in human readable form?

Thanks everyone - This is a great place to hang out and learn and Prestashop is getting bigger and better everyday

Robert

[mcs_services]

Generally speaking... originally most search engines simply would not index such URLs. This has changed, and now all the major search engines do index such URLs. However they recognize such URLs as dynamic and they both do not want to crash your server, or get stuck crawling and endless string of dynamic URLs. So if your URLs appear dynamic they may either crawl them more slowly, and or only crawl them if they have sufficient incoming links. The longer the URL the greater chance that it won't get crawled.

There is also the issue of session IDs, which won't really be covered here but need mentioned. Many software systems, such as forums or shopping carts, require the ability to track visitors. This is most often accomplished with cookies, but when cookies are not possible (such as when the user turns them off or when search engine robots visit), the software falls back on appending a long string of numbers to the URL. This is a session ID. Session IDs are not only unfriendly, but they also tend to change rapidly for search engines, causing them to see the same content at multiple URLs. In fact session IDs in your URL can still effectively kill your chance of being fully indexed by search engines. So the solution to this is to identify search engines by their HTTP_USER_AGENT and turn sessions IDs off for them. Most better software pages made by search engine conscious developers include this functionality now, but you should always verify that it works.

You should also be concerned with user friendliness. URLs with long query strings are not only unfriendly to search engines, but also to users. A user will have a far easier time remembering a URL with real words in it rather than a URL with cryptic numeric data & variable names. Search engine friendly URLs also easily allow you to hide the type of server side programming you're using by removing the tell tale extension (such as .php) from your URLs. This means you would be able to change your backend software at a later date without changing your URLs, and it may even provide a security bonus.

Help at all?

[rp]

Helps a lot - thanks