SEO test with phorum

I have been running a little test with the phorum software. On this site there is a live preview for a theme designed for it (martha). I decided to use it too as a test to see how well phorum urls are indexed in search engines, and I think these results also say something about dynamic urls in general.

Phorum urls generally consist of a few parameters behind the pagename. Examples are read.php?2,56 or list.php?4,page=2. It is generally known search engines don’t like these kind of urls. Yahoo eg, says the following:

Yahoo! does index dynamic pages, but for page discovery, our crawler mostly follows static links. We recommend you avoid using dynamically generated links except in directories that are not intended to be crawled/indexed (e.g., those should have a /robots.txt exclusion).

That’s pretty clear: if you like your site indexed with yahoo, don’t use dynamic urls. But google also has a few words on this matter:

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

So, while google doesn’t say it won’t index those pages, it does make clear using as little as possible parameters, or none, is for the better.

Back to the phorum-test. The site where phorum is developed is indexed pretty well. Eg, a pretty dynamic url with 3 parameters, as occures frequently in phorum, like http://phorum.org/phorum5/read.php?14,13421,page=2 is indexed both in google as in yahoo as in msn search. Nice, no problems with using phorum or dynamic urls in general right? Hmm, let’s take a look at my own test case. If I search in yahoo, not a single page is found (except for the forum index if you search in the right places). If I search in google, only a few pages are found. But not the most important ones, the read.php pages, where the actual post content is. No sign of them. Msn search did the best job: it indexed also those pages.

Conclusion: if you’re site isn’t that important, it is more unlikely that dynamic pages with parameters will be indexed in yahoo and google. But wait! Maybe I concluded this too soon? Maybe it should read: if you’re site isn’t that important, it is more unlikeley to be crawled deeply, if at all?

So I’ve put this to a test. Dynamic urls are now replaced by static ones. Monsters like read.php?2,356 are now transformed into somewhat better looking, uh, monsters like read/2/356/. The old urls are still there, so that might break a few things. If there’s no improvement in indexing, I’ll set up 301 redirects so that these oldies should disappear from the index.

To be continued…