Not sure if this will help or harm my SERPs...

[Barrucadu]

I recently changed all the URLs on my site (www.yarrt.com) from things like:

yarrt.com/games.php?p=0&order=file

To things like:

yarrt.com/games/start-0/sort-file/

So basically, i've broken the vast majority of my backlinks, in order to have prettier URLs.

I imagine that my ranking will drop for a while, then crawl back up again? Or have I just screwed up?
Also, should I redirect broken links to a 404 page, or the new page?

 

[Philleh]

In the long term, changing the link structure will help your serps. I'm not a real seo pro, but if I was you, I'd simply 301 redirect them?

 

[Barrucadu]

Thats what I was thinking, i'll make the redirects now.

 

[Amnezia]

You ranking will drop unless you 301 the old urls to the new ones. To be honest i'm not sure why you rewrote the URLS the originals look fine to me, doubt you'll see much benefit.

 

[Sixxer]

Yes why not redirect?... No need to change them, your just losing what you worked hard for.

 

[deep_3657]

That not going to matter from SEO point of view. Both the formats would be given same treatment

 

[Damion]

That not going to matter from SEO point of view. Both the formats would be given same treatment

That's actually not true, the first URL: yarrt.com/games.php?p=0&order=file is a classic SEO unfriendly URL

For a more into detail explanation this article sums it up nicely.

 

[deep_3657]

That's actually not true, the first URL: yarrt.com/games.php?p=0&order=file is a classic SEO unfriendly URL

For a more into detail explanation this article sums it up nicely.

I do not actually agree to the article very much.

It says that dynamic pages have URLs such as http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345 with different thread IDs. I agree.

But it says that all such URLs would be read as http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php by the search engines and that it will treat all pages with different thread ids as the same thread.php page. This is totally unacceptable to me because i have tested this times and again. Of late all major search engines have become intelligent enough to cater this problem.

Lets try it out:
There is a template selling site www.templatenewtons.com .They show up different categories of templates dynamically and their cat urls are like http://www.templatenewtons.com/search.php?cat_id=27 . The cat_id changes for every category.

Now when I explore the site in google/yahoo etc by typing "site:www.templatenewtons.com/search.php" or simply by "site:www.templatenewtons.com" ,the results DO show up all the dynamic URLs and moreover each one of those so said "dynamic URLs" are cached seperately.


Further study:
There are many PHPld directories which use dynamic URLs to show cats but each cats ARE indexed by search engines.

Under such a scenario how can we say that DYNAMIC PAGES ARE NOT INDEXED?

 

[Damion]

Google does have seen improvements with these type of URL's but the fact still remains that a URL like:

http://www.templatenewtons.com/search.php?cat_id=27

is pure and simple a unfriendly SEO URL and a URL like:

http://www.templatenewtons.com/wordpress/kubrick.php

would be proper URL structure.

Whether you not agree with was mentioned in that article if these type of pages getting indexed or not, these type of pages will not score very well when competing with friendly URLs.

Indexing and ranking are two different things.
I rather have my page indexed and ranking for a search phrase then only have that page indexed.

With dynamic URL's your pages are less spider friendly and i rather have a descriptive file name then a page being referred to as search.php?cat_id=27

It's good practice to have your URL containing a descriptive filename then for example having it crawled as search.php?cat_id=27

So from Google's point of view it does surely make a difference.

 

[deep_3657]

Yes, in my opinion it is better to have a descriptive filename such as topic.htm if you are building from the scratch, but there's no need to make efforts to change a dynamic system to static one

 

[Damion]

Of course it is, every positive factor you can attribute to revamping a site's structure to improve it's visibility in the index thus better rankings is a must do in my opinion...unless one doesn't care about their rankings.

 

[Barrucadu]

You ranking will drop unless you 301 the old urls to the new ones. To be honest i'm not sure why you rewrote the URLS the originals look fine to me, doubt you'll see much benefit.

I changed them because:

• They are now more SE friendly, which is always a good thing.
• I think the URLs are also much easier to remember now, and easier to tell someone (game dash..., rather than games dot php question mark...)
• I've been trying to think of something to update for a few months and this seemed a good idea.