Does
a question mark in the URL affect ranking?
Long ago, it was the consensus in the search engine industry that
dynamic URLs (those with a question mark in them) weren't indexed
by the major search engines. Later, consensus was that Google
indexed some URLs with question marks, but ranked them lower.
Currently it seems that the search engine industry consensus is
that Google indexes dynamic URLs just fine and ranks them right
along with other URLs, unless there is a long number after the
question mark or an "id=" in it which might indicate a
session ID.
Methodology
That's a lot of theories. It's probably time to get the facts.
The
methodology used to find this answer is very simple. I gathered
the results of the queries naturally performed last month by
myself and four associates using Yahoo! and Google. I then tallied
the URLs that contained a question mark for each ranking.
Those results were further refined by converting them into a
percentage of the total pages found. Here is the graph showing
Google and Yahoo results:
The X-axis shows the rankings from 1 through 8. The Y-axis shows
the percentage of URLs found that contained a question mark.
Results
Accessibility & CSS support packages
Get on-going help with:
-
Problem HTML and/or CSS code
-
Accessibility checking of new or existing pages
-
The writing of HTML/CSS code
-
Training or advice on accessibility and/or CSS
-
Get accessibility & CSS help now!
The
first thing we note is that both Yahoo! and Google do contain URLs
that contain a question mark. Those major search engines do
include some URLs with question marks.
The second thing to notice is the small percentages for both
Google and Yahoo!. The average percentage of URLs with question
marks is only about 5% on Google and 3% on Yahoo!. It isn't known
what percentage of total URLs have question marks, but it seems
very likely that it is a much higher percentage. The difference
between Yahoo! and Google further shows that Yahoo! doesn't
include as many dynamic URLs as Google.
It is clear from the data that Google ranks dynamic URLs (those
containing a question mark) lower on average than other URLs. The
ranking correlation is a -42 on a scale of -100 to +100. That same
bias doesn't seem to occur on Yahoo! where the ranking correlation
is a -7 on the same scale. If dynamic URLs make it into the Yahoo!
index, they rank as well as other URLs.
Conclusion
Don't use dynamic URLs (URLs with question marks in them). If you
have dynamic URLs on your website read this Webmaster World post
about how to redirect them to static URLs.
This article was written by Jon Ricerca. Jon is one of the leading
researchers and authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF)
reports at SearchEngineGeek.com.
