Hallo,
I’m looking for some clear documentation about query strings in URLs.
I’ve read the SitePoint page linked in the stickies about “search-engine friendly URLs” which to me sounds like something the client should be charged extra for, since it seems to be a real song and dance number with nice potential for problems (especially since the article assumes a fairly simple GET-request-asks-db-directly thing without thought of any search engines like ElasticSearch or mem-cachey things in-bewteen).
Assuming an e-commerce site, and that all product category pages and all main product pages are available via normal URLs (no query strings and can be found by clicking normal links, as well as the presence of a sitemap.xml with all products), then the argument that “search engines don’t index pages with a ? in the URL” is moot, correct? Because these pages all have a non-QS URL as well which is completely indexable (and cononicalised)?
Similarly, if search bots never
- fill in search forms
- interact with javascripted filter elements like lists of checkboxes (also a form really)
then they should never directly be confronted with query-stringed URLs, even if human users can. If so, should it matter than a user can GET pages using a URL that has a query-string in it, if a search bot should never encounter one naturally anyway?
The reason I’m asking is because some certain folks are asking us to use a “dirty-url” system where all the ?'s of the query string get turned into something else, in this case now a #, which to mean means something very specific to browsers… and seems to hack around a problem created by the SEO world.
If our URLs that do have query strings are redundant and only used by people, I’d like to know, so I can stop worrying about rewriting very long URLs with many many filters for some search engine who’s never going to purchase our clients’ products anyway.
If it does matter, then we know this one time the SEO guys weren’t just making stuff up and we can charge the client for dirtier URLs (since apparently we “must” use the # method for some reason).
Thanks in advance for any links, references, or anecdotes. In the meantime yes, I am going through more of the stickies, but they have many many pages and I am afraid I’ll miss something (so a link to a post deep in a sticky would also be sufficient, if it’s not out of date).