Hi hopefully a quick and simple question with a quick and simple answer!
Which of the following would be better for SEO purposes
/news?pg=2
or
/news/2/
Does the second one dilute the page rank by being an extra folder level in? Does then outweigh the fact that the pg reference is in the querystring and therefore not a 'page' in itself.
Cheers, Steve
For SEO purposes and to get more towards being RESTful the second is a much better option.
Being an extra folder in does not dilute page rank: However having symbols in your url certainly makes it harder for people to navigate your site. If you have a proper sitemap, the extra levels of folders won't be too much of a cause for concern when it comes to spiders unless the folder structure is very very deep, and your site will be much better organized.
Edited to address comments.
They are both unique URIs so I doubt there's much difference SEO wise.
What I would do is this:
/news?page=2
This, in a RESTful sense, is saying give me page 2 of all the news items.
Then this URI:
/news/2/{title of news item}
Would refer to a news item with the ID of 2, only including the title of the article for SEO purposes.
I agree that you should choose scheme #2, but with the following proviso:
I'm imagining that you're using this for a news aggregation page with links to each news item and maybe a bit of the first paragraph. This would mean that the variable you're passing has to do with pagination, and not the ID of the news item.
If you're using this scheme for news items, what you should really be doing is something more like /news/man-bites-dog/ or /news/paris-hilton-did-something/ -- basically, lowercase your headline and join it with a dash. It may mean you'll have to have unique news story titles and you'll have to look them up by name rather than an indexed ID, but if you're actually worried about search optimization, the slight performance decrease is nothing compared to the strength of the text you're optimizing for in your URL.
Although Search Engines can now spider dynamic URLs (ex: news.php?id=23423), it is now standard practice to follow a URL rewrite for better readability (ex: /news/23423/).