Yahoo offers Dynamic URL Rewriting

by Patrick Altoft on August 21, 2007 / 2 responses

Despite the title Yahoo have not decided to launch a .htaccess file
creation service. The new Dynamic URL Rewriting service allows webmasters
registered with Yahoo Site Explorer to remove unnecessary parameters
such as session and tracking id’s from their urls.

The service seems to be quite good but won’t be much use to most
decent webmasters who stopped showing session id’s to search engines
(and visitors) a few years ago.

Yahoo does offer some killer advice in the article, telling you why
session id’s should be removed:

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs
  being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our
  crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic
  parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic
  parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better aggregation of link juice to your sites, which can
  help your pages rank better

Link juice is a term I love to use but it never seemed real until now.

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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.