I was wondering if search engine bots like or dislike "href="?name=var" style links. Don't think i've had the pages with those links in up long enough for them to be crawled, or they don't like them and are ignored.

Peter

They don't have a problem with links containing querystrings as long as the querystrings don't go too long and as long as you don't embed session hashes or things like that into them.

I know that. I was wondering if they mind, for example:

<a href="?name=var">link</a>

instead of

<a href="index.php?name=var">link</a>

I don't think it would make a difference, but if that variable changes then they'll start to see the pages as duplicate content.

index.php?name=var1
index.php?name=var2
index.php?name=var3

You'd probably want to use .htacess (I'm assuming your server is running apache) or a robots.txt file to tell engines which version of your page is the one you want indexed.

Also whichever way you choose be consistent across the site.

Old rumours say: Don't you use a "?" sign in your URLs

I heard Google was against them but changed their minds. SEO for dummies says it's ok aslong as it's not too long like you said, but that book must be a few years old now.

Search engines can crawl and index dynamic pages. If you have too many parameters it could trip them up. I used to see three parameters max, but two max is probably better. They also want to stay away from session IDs so it's usually best not to use something with 'ID' in a parameter.

But dynamic URLs are fine as a general rule.

Bots are now much more intelligent now. A "?" is not really going to be a problem.

As soon as you have variables in your URL string, you are just asking for trouble. Google flat out states they have troubles indexing Dynamic content. In fact I've seen cases where 1) Google fails to Spider these URLs at all 2) Google does spider them but penalizes them harshly (ie Homepage has PR5, Link from Homepage to page with variable is PR2, instead of the expected 4!). However if your running Apache and Modwrite is enabled it won't take you very long for google to give you the rankings you should. Cheers.

hmm...Dynamic content..What does that mean?

lol..
I work with content a lot and would like to know ty.

Vasity dynamic content usually refers to content pulled from a database. Think of an ecommerce site where your products sit in a database and when you call a page the products are pulled from the database to display on a page.

Another example is a content management system where your site is really a template that pulls content from the database to display. Blogs work this way. The benefit is that it's easier to create and modify pages since you don't need to touch the code and it's easier to make one change to a template file to change the look than it is to change a bunch of pages.

Usually you can tell content on a site is dynamic if you see parameters at the end of the URL like

index.php?prod=234&color=blue

prod and color are the parameters or variables and 234 and blue are their respective values. In this case prod 234 could be a shirt, but prod 235 could have been a pair of pants. The code for the page would still be the same, but the code would call different text and images based on the prod value.

Same thing for the color. You could have images of blue, red, and green shirts and the value for color grabs the right image from the database.

Daryl I think that may have been the case at one time, but search engines can and do read dynamic URLs. They can get caught up with session ids and they might get tripped up on a lot of parameters, but it's perfectly fine to use one or two parameters in URLs

PageRank wouldn't really be affected like you say. The fact that the page had any PR is an indication that it's URL was able to be spidered and indexed.