Do the characters in a query string matter to search engine rankings?
May 15th, 2008I wrote a couple years ago about a neat little trick I figured out for getting my dynamically generated web pages listed in the search engines by converting id references from numerical to alphabetical characters. Eventually the search engines caught up and it was big news when Google and MSN started including dynamically generated web pages in their search results, making this hack interesting but not terribly useful.
I wanted to revisit this concept in light of our current testing to find out not just if a page with a numerical id query string would be indexed but whether search engines had any kind of preference with regards to query strings. The answer, while not exactly shocking, is interesting nonetheless. Here’s the set-up:
Two pages, each with similar keyword density, title tags, etc. but each with a unique query string: one is page.php?id=123, the other is page.php?id=abc. Based on our tests, both pages were indexed by Google at the same time but the alphabetical query string (abc) is listed as the first result - meaning, Google prefers query strings that look like words. Of course once again, Yahoo! takes the opposite track and prefers the ‘123′ page so you’ll have to decide which search engine is more important to your site 
If you already have pages with numerical query strings I don’t recommend converting to an alphabetical scheme because it will take time for your pages to be re-indexed (and you may run into duplicate content issues in the interim). Rather, consider what types of query strings your pages will use when creating your next website to maximize your search engine ranking success!
