SEO ISSUE

[saadi06]

HI,
I am working in opencart and I am implementing seo in it.I want to know that does this link will make any difference in seo www.test.com/category/subcategory/country?country_id=222
instead of www.test.com/category/subcategory/country.
My main question is that if we add arguments to url after making our links fancy,does it make any difference or not.
Thanks in advance.

[cwarn23]

Well one could argue that it makes no difference at all to the SEO however others could argue the opposite. But really it comes down to the search engine your optimizing for. For instance, google rates words at the beginning of the address such as "www" and "test" with more points than it does with other parts such as "country" and "php". So in the end when optimizing url's put the important stuff to the left side of the url and the not so important stuff to the right side of the url.

[Dani]

Many years ago, search engines didn't like dynamic URLs (URLs with query strings) because you effectively had an infinite number of pages, and robots could get caught in an infinite loop. While that may no longer be the case, Google and many other search engines still highly recommend to limit the number of query strings within a URL to one or two absolute tops. Therefore, I interpret that to mean that they still are frowned upon.

If you had the option to go with option 1 (with queries) or option 2, I would definitely choose to not have them if you could help it. However, it's not necessarily worth redoing your existing site structure if it's going to be costly to do so.