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.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
won’t be much use to most decent webmasters who stopped showing session id’s to search engines (and visitors) a few years ago.
I agree but it is indeed better than nothing. Hats off to them IMO
Yahoo seem to be really trying to help webmasters improve the web. They have also released the YSlow plugin for Firefox which helps you figure out why your pages display slowly in browsers even though your server is blazingly fast.
Although they aren’t quite as good at this as Google is, Yahoo are trying to be insanely useful in order to grab some extra market share. Yahoo pipes is another example. Given long enough, I think they might even get good at it…
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