How SEO friendly is this URL ?

Question

I have this products catalog site.For the sake of SEO, I would have wanted my 'view details' link to look some thing like this

~/products/26-productname or ~/products/26/productname

On my machine I'm using a url re-writing module and it works well. Unfortunately My host(shared) does not support url re-writing modules or Aspnet 4.0 for now. So I came up with a workaround that attempts to be SEO friendly

Instead of this :

~/Products/details.aspx?id=26

I decided to simply append the product name in the url and i.e

~/Products/details.aspx?product=26-Toshiba Qosmio Notebook

So my question is how SEO friendly is such a URL and is my attempt worth anything at all?

Answer 1

IMO - your URL should read as:

/products/toshiba-qosmio-notebook/

or

/products/26/

and in both cases should point to the same resource. This is more SEO than the link you provided with the query parameters as it points to a resource URI rather than a URL as in your code.

If your host does not support url-rewrite, perhaps it is time to move to a different host who supports this...

HTH

Answer 2

It doesn't really make a difference to search engines if you use just a number or a number and a string, but you should make sure that the parameter is recognized correctly:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-parameter-handling-tool-helps-with.html