AutoMapIt Sitemap Creation Service

Long time subscribers of AutoMapIt have seen a few of the tools that I provide go into the mainstream search engines in one way or another. I like to think of it as a testament to my staying a step or two ahead of the search engines and designing tools to help keep you, the webmasters and SEO community, there on the front lines. Yahoo has just released the first-ever Beta launch of ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting‘ in Site Explorer. This tool is very similar to the “Ignore URL Key” filter that has been available to AutoMapIt users for a good, long time and allows you help filter a portion of a URL on your site. It is an awesome tool that helps you to be sure that session IDs do not make it into the URLs indexed for your site.

Most session IDs use a 32 character string of numbers 0-9 and letters A-F (hex-based). This means 16 possibilities for each character to the 32 (character) power or 3 with 38 zeroes after it… yup, a lot of potential page with different URLs all saying the exact same thing as each other. By stripping out the session IDs, these pages are consolidated into one.

Another issue that a tool like this could help to fix would be the ability to exclude URLs with certain keys or key/value pairs altogether. Yes, AutoMapIt has these as well. These types of filters are handy for skipping past pages such as action=buynow or redirect_to=htpp:///xxxxxx which typically all look the same and don’t really contain any unique content to the other pages like these…

Imagine a 1,000 page catalog… every item description page has a link to a ‘print version’, ‘buy now’, ‘tell-a-friend’… it usually doesn’t matter which product is shown… the tell-a-friend has the same form on it with a unique identifier. The only difference between one page and the other is the product ID code. Aside from possible a 6-8 digit ID number, those are 1,000 tell-a-friend pages that are exactly the same as each other. Plus 1,000 buy now pages that are exactly like each other… and 1,000 pages worth of print versions exactly like their parent pages.

That’s a TON of bandwidth that can be saved by using filters and tools like Dynamic URL Rewriting from Yahoo! Well, Yahoo has taken the first step toward this bright future and hopefully webmasters can continue to help Yahoo help the webmasters.

If you haven’t done so already, get over to Yahoo! and setup your filters… then come back to AutoMapIt and use the same filters AND MORE to help out the other search engines.

tags: Dynamic URL Rewriting, sitemap, seo

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 4:51 pm and is filed under AutoMapIt News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.