URL Rewritting

The idea behind URL rewriting is to avoid dirty urls that are long and obscure to users. Instead, urls are automatically rewritten to be provided to users and search engines in a clean and meaningful way.

Why using URL rewriting ?

When using clean urls, the long chain of variables is replaced with keywords related to the content of the web page. Rewritten urls are usually shorter, easier to read and to remember by users. Clean urls are often used for search engine optimization (SEO) and often referred to as search engine friendly URLs (sef urls). Indeed, search engines index keywords in sef urls with more or less weight depending on the relationship with other keywords on the page. If the keywords in the URL, page title, meta tags and content are all chosen with a strong level of correlation, it should further increase the impact on search engines indexing.

Example of clean and dirty URLs:

Dirty url: http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?q=taxonomy&term=1
As this kind of URLs are not easily readable by humans, they are also not for Search Engine crawling robots.
 

Clean url: http://www.yoursite.com/shanghai/graphic-web-design
A clear and simple URL makes both users and crawlers able to understand the page content, and its position towards the website hierarchy.

However, as part of white hat SEO, this technique focuses on increasing your website’s organic seo which is a long term strategy and is hard to measure. There is no guarantee on the effect of this technique on your seo in term of search engine ranking. Although the impact on search engines is arguable, many experts believe that search engine friendly urls do improve clickthroughs as being seen more trustable to users.

Since user friendly urls are convenient to read and remember, they are easily accessed through search engine result pages (SERPs), ads linking to landing pages, social bookmarking links or simply bookmarks in your own browser. From a technical perspective, url rewriting is sometimes hard to achieve since it partially depends on the server on which a website is hosted.

Davyin Internet Solutions offers web consulting and development services based on the Open Source framework, Drupal which runs on the Open Source LAMP ([l|node/15|Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP]) architecture. Url rewriting usually requires a careful configuration of the Apache server in order to enable clean urls in Drupal. However, it really provides a flexible user interface to manage search engine friendly urls on a web site. Websites such as longevitychina.com require simple customization to allow friendly urls. But when it comes to larger projects such as the nextstepdirectory.com, we have to build automatic engines to generate urls based on the organization of your content.

No matter what the size of your website is, we have the expertise to improve your site’s seo by implementing successfully search engine friendly urls.