: SEO on pages whose content is determined by query string in URL I have a blog as part of my site. The address of the blog is ../blog.php. If you go to blog.php you will see the most recent

@Gail5422790

Yes, it matters a great deal. If your page is blog.php?entry=## how does the crawler know what even goes there? As far as the crawler is concerned, the page has no content.

To fix this issue requires several things to be done. (since you already have blog entries).

First - Create a new field in your blog entry table like PageName varchar(50) NOT NULL

Second - Populate that field for each of your entries with a title related that entry's content like "how-to-make-great-crepes". This will be used for two things. Note: Make sure every page title is unique!


Your new pretty url
As a parameter to tell blog.php what to display instead of using a number.


Third - Rewrite your sql select statement changing SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE id=something to SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE PageName=something. Now we are pulling content based on the page name instead of based on the unique id.

Fourth - Create a rewrite rule in your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On # Turn on the rewriting engine
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)$ blog.php?entry= [NC,L] # Handle blog requests


Fifth - (because you have existing entries) Create a permanent redirect to your existing entries. This is also done in your .htaccess file.

Redirect 301 /blog.php?entry=1 /pretty-url-here
Redirect 301 /blog.php?entry=2 /pretty-url-here
etc.


Why do you need the redirects? Because other people may already be linking to your blog entries using the old link example-site.com/blog.php?entry=43. We need to redirect them to the new URL.

Finally, rewrite the links to your blog entries like this

<a href="/how-to-make-great-crepes">How to Make Great Crepes</a>


instead of

<a href="/blog.php?entry=43">How to Make Great Crepes</a>


I know this may seem like a lot of work, but it will be worth it in the long run for SEO purposes.

Hope this helps.

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@Connie744

Yes, it does matter that all your blog entries are using the same page with different query strings for different content. Not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages (URL contains a ? character) as well as static pages (URL with descriptive words).

For better SEO and especially to make it user-friendly, you must change your URL structure so that it contains relevant words rather than parameters and variables. (See page 8 on Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide for more details on the best way to go about doing this.)

If your blog runs on Wordpress, you can easily do this by changing your Wordpress permalink structure. (How to change your WordPress Permalink Structure)

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