[documentation] clean urls page

[Laura Scott]

On Jun 13, 2006, at 12:56 PM, Greg Knaddison - GVS wrote:

> On 6/13/06, Boerland, Bert <bert.boerland at getronics.com> wrote:
>> Good to see that you have / had a nice pageranking and bots index  
>> your site, that is normal behaviour. However you are wrong  
>> regarding clean urls and SEO. Having session ID's in your url  
>> (e.g. example.com/index.php&PHPSESSIONID=PHP763t6juyecbejbhy) will  
>> drop your pageranking since you will have an enormous number of  
>> pages all with the same content. So having clean URL's is one way  
>> of doing SEO.
>> --
>
> Are you implying that PHPSESSIONID and clean urls are related?
> Because I'm pretty sure they aren't.
>
> I'm not sure that clean urls are all that helpful for SEO, but they
> are helpful for users which is arguably more important.

I'm not sure if Google does this any more -- they keep changing their  
algorithms -- but some search engines do rank pages that have search  
keywords in the URLs. I'm on a few SEO lists and the issue does come  
up a lot, and the general consensus is that it's a plus. Given the  
high performance of most Drupal sites whether they have pathauto  
working or not, though, I'd say it's not a requirement for decent  
page rankings.

Laura