What are search engine friendly URLs?

Search engine robots/spiders have until recently refused to index dynamically created pages (and currently only a few, like Google, will index your dynamic page but they tend not to follow anymore dynamic links from their) which are in the form:

my_page.php?id=13

The solution (as done, partially, here) is to create a seemingly 'static' URL like:

my_page/13/

and get some kind of server-side processing to pass the variables through to the dynamic pages.

There are many different ways to do this depending on your server/platform:

Apache

Apache comes with a rewrite module which can be used for this purpose. You can use your .htaccess file and put something like this in it:

quote:

---

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule my_page/([0-9]*) /my_page.php?id=$1 [L]

---

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Relevant threads:

Dynamic Pages with Static URL's

Dynamic Pages & Search Engines

Quick dynamic page/search question

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Relevant FAQs:

Can you help me understand regular expressions?

__________________________
Emperor

(Added by: Emperor on Sat 11-Jan-2003)

(Edited by: Emperor on Mon 10-Mar-2003)