I just can’t believe what I have seen today, in what can only be the most stupidest descision that a competitor has ever done,they remove the mod rewrite on all the Urls’s from :.co.uk/productname.htmlto.co.uk/product-detail.asp?prodid=1111111&prodgrid=2222222222&catTID=9998&subTID=11111&rangeid=444444&rid=1111 not only that they haven’t 301′d the old url’s at first I thought it was a error, but they have redesigned the site and it looks like it totally intentional , btw I have noticed them already losing their rankings hahah
DaveN
14 Comments
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18th October 2008 @ 14:45
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LOL!
The Google propaganda has no limits in the minds of the uniformed.
18th October 2008 @ 15:29
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Wow, it’s quite scary how much some people are following Matt’s word to the letter…
18th October 2008 @ 20:21
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It’s like the old story of the person who was told to “crack” their windows before a storm…and they went ahead and did it…with a hammer.
19th October 2008 @ 14:23
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I am in the middle of migrating 10 websites to a new CMS, and every last possible dynamic URL request format you can think of… parameters in any order, and extra junk within or on the end of the URL (whether those are the direct-access “parameter” version of the current folder-like URLs, or whether they are the old-style dynamic format the sites used in previous years, even many years ago) all get redirected to the correct page and using the correct folder-like format for the new URL (if there is a new URL).
For those done last week, Google is already on the case reindexing everything, and there is even traffic coming through the new redirects that were setup for incoming links that were pointing to URLs that haven’t been in use for several years. Previously those just hit a nondescript 404 error page. There’s no way these sites would ever go back to using a parameter-based format.
Testing all the rules was a very big effort, with a URL list of hundreds of different formats, both for expected and unexpected formats, all thrown at Xenu Linksleuth to see what the result would be. It is amazing how many typos in code that “appears to work” are found, as well as a few logic errors and shortcomings in the design. However, now it is done, the sites should be rock-solid as far as canonicalisation goes… Bye Bye multiple horrendous duplicate content and URLs with far too many parameters, several of which could be wildcarded and still return some sort of content.
19th October 2008 @ 20:00
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[...] David Naylor saw Google’s bad advice on “no need to rewrite your URLs” in action, when a competing site reverted their URLs to uglier versions and promptly saw their rankings tank. [...]
20th October 2008 @ 03:26
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There is no way I’d turn off isapi rewrite on the basis of that google post! Doh!
20th October 2008 @ 08:35
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[...] Update 2008-10-20: Please check why not url rewrite may be stupid. [...]
20th October 2008 @ 08:49
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[...] Update 2008-10-20: Please check why not url rewrite may be stupid. [...]
20th October 2008 @ 08:49
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Wow! This is even more stupid than the “we don’t want short, readable urls since we don’t want to look SEOed” statements I’ve been hearing.
Lovely, just lovely.
20th October 2008 @ 10:08
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Never believe what Google will tell you, plus the article in fact did not say to stop rewriting URL’s. Anyone that would do what Dave is testing and observing deserves to lose their rankings.
Thanks for the Monday laugh.
Cheers,
Dan20th October 2008 @ 19:05
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Even if they are following Google’s advice, they should have:
[1] Remembered that Google is not the only search engine.
[2] Only used dynamic URLs if the variables have decipherable meanings (i.e. “game=monopoly”).
[3] 301 redirected all of the old static URLs to the new dynamic URLs.20th October 2008 @ 19:20
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[...] David Naylor saw Google’s bad advice on “no need to rewrite your URLs” in action, when a competing site reverted their URLs to uglier versions and promptly saw their rankings tank. [...]
20th October 2008 @ 20:53
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[...] your URLs” in action, when a competing site reverted their URLs to uglier versions and promptly saw their rankings tank. Kentucky seized a bunch of online gambling domains. “”””The court recognizes that [...]
22nd October 2008 @ 20:17
Copyright © 2004 - 2009 David Naylor. All rights reserved |
Haven’t they just followed Google’s advice on dynamic vs. static URL’s (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html)?