Use Static Links

Every page in your site that you want to appear in search results should be reachable by at least one static link. A static link is a URL that does not contain special characters, such as http://www.bu.edu/webcentral/learning/google/code/links.html.

URLs that contain "?" are called dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are created by server-side scripting languages, such as php, asp, jsp, perl, and cgi. The portion of the URL appearing after "?" is the page's query string parameter and is the part of the URL that changes.

For its search engine, Yahoo recommends that "you avoid using dynamically generated links except in directories that are not intended to be crawled/indexed." Google and some other search engines can handle dynamic URLs, unless the query string parameter gets long or complex (such as having more than one "?").

If your site depends on dynamically generated URLs and you are having trouble with search ranking, you may be able to rewrite the URLs to simplify them for the search engine. Because rewriting URLs involves server configuration, you may need some help and should contact NIS.