May 07 2007
Looking for a particular type of shopping cart for a client today, I came across one that listed this as a feature:
> [Our cart will] ensure your website is listed higher on Google. Use html to create your website rather than asp and php and your products will appear higher on Google natural listings. Many asp/php sites cannot get their pages listed at all! (The cart does work with asp/php websites too!)
Now, the average person may read this and think this to be 100% true. Unfortunately, it's not. While it's true that there are e-commerce sites that don't rank well - if at all - in Google, it isn't because it's an ASP or PHP site. The programming language for a site has little to do with its rankings.
Perhaps what the developers of this particular cart are getting at has to do with search engine friendly URLs. See, because a shopping site, by nature, is dynamic, the URLs of individual pages tend to be what's called a "query string". These URLs look something like this:
See all those letters and numbers? That's a query string. Search engines aren't big fans of them. Why? Because they're meaningless. They don't carry a lot of information that's relevant to a search engine.
Instead, a clean URL will contain real words that mean something to not only search engines, but also to human beings. They're more readable; such as the URL of this very blog post.
Now, I can't speak for the developers of the cart, so I don't know what they're implying with that claim. After all, search engine ranking - even natural, organic, search engine ranking - doesn't happen overnight, and certainly not with the install of a shopping cart. It's an ongoing process. All I can say is to be wary of statements like this. Could end up being completely untrue.
See all those letters and numbers? That's a query string. Search engines aren't big fans of them. Why? Because they're meaningless. They don't carry a lot of information that's relevant to a search engine.
Instead, a clean URL will contain real words that mean something to not only search engines, but also to human beings. They're more readable; such as the URL of this very blog post.
Now, I can't speak for the developers of the cart, so I don't know what they're implying with that claim. After all, search engine ranking - even natural, organic, search engine ranking - doesn't happen overnight, and certainly not with the install of a shopping cart. It's an ongoing process. All I can say is to be wary of statements like this. Could end up being completely untrue.