Quite pleased with myself, TempleDene sites will now be able to have search engine friendlier links.

Previously the CMS would create links to pages in a format like this

/articledisplay.php?articleno=1158835442&PageNo=2

Now by use of some mod_rewrite trickery and some revamping of the code most links to pages will instead look like

/2/1158835442/this_page.html

There are several reasons for this, firstly the new style looks friendlier to the human eye.

Secondly search engines can sometimes decide they won't index pages which look like they are dynamically created, so the first link, the old style, could be rejected. (Google doesn't seem to do this, but some other search engines do, rather annoying)

Thirdly the new look page links mean it is far easier to work out which pages have been visited when you are looking at your page stats in statcounter and similar systems.

And finally, the new style is better for certain types of link manager software which just can't handle the ? and & symbols in the link. (the TempleDene link manager does handle them of course)

We're currently trialing this new system on our own site, and intend to wait and see how search engines handle the new format before rolling the changes out to our clients, this should only take a couple of weeks to give those spiders time to crawl our site.