Having become a bit of a self proclaimed expert on mod_rewrite, I spend an inordinate amount of time answering mod_rewrite questions on #apache, on irc.freenode.net.
Unfortunately, much of that time is utterly wasted on something known as "Search Engine Optimization", or SEO. SEO is an industry that has grown up around profound ignorance about how search engines work, and the basic theory goes like this. Certain URLs are "bad" and others are "good", and you need to use mod_rewrite to convert "bad" URLs into "good" ones. Bad URLs are those that contain "?" and "&" and "=" and other non-alphanumeric characters. Thus, one must use mod_rewrite to create URLs that lack these characters.
This is all very well except for one thing - it's nonsense, utterly untrue. Now, it may have been true 10 years ago, but since then, search engine algorithms have gotten better, and it's just not the case any more.
Below is a comprehensive list of the search engines that matter:
The algorithm used by the search engines in this list goes basically like this: If your content is worthwhile, other people will link to you. Therefore, sites that have a lot of links to them are good sites and should appear at the top of searches.
That's it. Nothing to do with the characters appearing in the URL. So if you've paid some SEO firm a great sum of money to increase your search engine ranking, the chances are very, very high that you've wasted that money.
And yet, it seems that more than half of the questions that we field on #apache have directly to do with this false belief in the principles of SEO. This is a great shame, since there are actually some people with legitimate questions, and they have to wait for the nonsense.
Now, notion of "good URLs" does have one redeeming quality. URLs that are easier to read to someone over the phone, and easier to remember, have a certain amount of value in marketing. This is undeniable. For this purpose, Apache provides the Redirect directive, whereby you redirect the easy-to-remember URL to the actual URL.
Another useful technique is to actually design your website with non-convoluted URLs from the start.
However, none of these techniques will improve your search engine ranking if your content isn't good. Content is important. Your URL isn't important.
I realize that there are folks who are convinced of the necessity of creating "pretty URLs", and reading this article won't in any way dissuade them. The reasoning seems to go that everybody is doing it, and therefore it must be right. I'll not waste your time with explaining the fallacy in this position. I will, however, direct you to the page that Google themselves have compiled to tell you about how their search algorithms work.
And, yes, I know that there are actually other search engines that matter. Their ranking algorithms are not so very different, and even when they are, the people programming them are not so stupid as to be unaware that almost every site on the web is composed of applications that load content out of databases, and are therefore likely to have URLs containing query string characters. So de-valuing sites that contain those characters in their URLs would be exceedingly counterproductive. Give them some credit.
Updated Sept 20 18:43: Note that I've updated the title of this article, due to some of the feedback in the comments. I concede that there may be people in the "SEO" industry who are not snake-oil salesmen. I can even somewhat believe that all the satisfied customers never make it to #apache, and the folks who are there are the very ones who received bad advice. It's more than a little damning that every SEO website that I've looked at is full of terrible advice. Presumably, then, the folks who are are good at their job are just being secretive.
Excellent stuff, Doc!
I really hope people will wake up a bit and start to smell the coffee. And I, for one, will sure pass this on!
Are you only critical of worrying about URLs or about SEO in general? It sounds as if you're equating the two, but isn't the former only a subset of the latter. Heck, doesn't "SEO" include finding appropriate places, like business listings, to link back to your site?
I'm not an SEO, but it does seem that good ones are able to produce results. Some of them even honest, appropriate results.
I have a friend who would like to have his business appear higher in the organic results, specifically when his city-of-location is included in the search (because he can only conduct his business in-person), and I'd like to help him. For what he does in his location, there's a decent chance that people searching for his specialty and city would *like* to find his site.
Since he's a local (non-internet) business, he's not going to naturally get links from all over the web. Thus it would be nice to understand what smaller techniques are likely to give him the "best bang for the buck" rather than just writing them all off as useless when compared to the massive linking that good global sites automatically receive.
Isn't that the kind of thing that good SEO can help with?
I think there are lots of good reasons for having "pretty URLs" beyond generic anal retentiveness. I agree that an irrational fear that if your site gets magically transported back in time to 1995 Altavista will fail to index the pages that have GET parameters in the URL is a stupid reason, but I do think it is a good practice in general.
Good URLs are human readable.
http://lukewelling.com/2007/07/31/short-clean-uris-are-more-secure/
Hmm. Yeah. That's not what I'm saying at all.
What I'm complaining about here is, very specifically, the folks that spend ALL of their time making the URLs prettier, while not giving any thought whatsoever to the content of their site.
Pretty URLs do not, by themselves, improve search engine rankings. This is a myth that folks have invested millions of dollars into, and it's just plain false.
And the fact is that this is one of the things that the SEO companies out there preach, because it's cheap and easy to implement, and it is SO difficult to measure objectively, so you can always blame failure on one of the other million variables involved.
I maintain that 90% of the SEO companies out there are relying entirely on the gullibility and ignorance of their customers, and most of their customers could get better results by using techniques that are documented on free websites. Most of these techniques boil down to good content. In the end, content is king.
I initially thought you were simply discussing URL-convolutions, but a friend thought you were also discounting SEO in general, and on second read, I started to agree.
In particular, your title and some of your overarching statements can be taken as discounting the entire field, which has the potential to turn away some people who might be willing to hear your particular concerns about URLs.
i.e. you might make your case a little better if you clarify that you're only talking about URLs. That is all.
It might be stupid, but I actually feel insulted by this article, and by the "URL rewriting == SEO" thought that seems to be behind it. As a professional SEO, I spend most of my time talking with clients about what they do, and how they should transform what they're telling me into content on their website, how to market their site so they get more links, and a small, tiny, bit of my time, into optimizing the URL's.
You know what good SEO's consider to be the most important reason for user-friendly URL's? You can put a keyword in there, which is good for your rankings on that keyword / those keywords, but the most value comes from people thinking "hey, that seems to be like what I'm looking for, *click*"
I agree that there are a lot of snake oil salesmen in our industry. I also agree that 90% of the good SEO stuff, is freely available on the web. It's the experience of having done more than one or two sites that people can't buy, and most of the time, they're fully aware they could do it themselves, but they just don't have the time.
Don't blame many, many people in an industry for a few people doing silly stuff.
Perhaps you should educate your customers a little better, then. Day in and day out, dozens of people come into #apache and assert that SEO == URL Rewriting.
I will, however, given your feedback, rephrase the title of this posting.
Thx, I appreciate that. Is that #apache on freenode? I'll join in for a few days to see the questions :)
Yeah..
Here is a really bad URl. The keywords in it seem to have little to do with the content on the page. It's just a matter of time before this site starts losing traffic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:North_America
On the last three Wordpress blogs I set up, and the last Wiki I setup, I didn't even bother with the "pretty urls".
I agree with the Dr. here. The SEs are looking at your content. In the long run your site will sink or swim via content.
Terry
(couldn't help myself)
Keywords != Ranking
While it's correct that Google does parse URLs for possible keywords when it crawls links, obviously they give link terms (and even link titles) priority. And when it comes down to it, as the good Dr. states so clearly, Google ranking is not based upon the existence of the keywords themselves, but on who links to you and how often.
Keywords can just as easily be added in meta tags, via freetagging, or simply within the content itself. There's no special benefit in putting them in the URL instead. In fact, if you overweigh your keywords compared to your content, there's a good chance you'll start bumping into Google's anti-gaming algorithms, which may push you down on rankings instead.
I can see how many SEOs have gotten fooled into their false perspective, but it's also in large part due to their eagerness to find magical mystique in the ranking process in order to turn a dollar.