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The Secrets of WHOIS on SEO
2007-07-19 21:52:00
http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=183 http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/06 0508-235246 http://www.internic.net/whois.html WHOIS is a protocol that is used to identify the owner of a domain name or IP address on the Internet. The WHOIS information is now used for validating domains and their content dynamically by search engines and their crawlers: inception date of the domain (age of the site and its content) expiration of the domain (legitimacy of the site and its content – shorter registrations rank lower) Frequency of changes to the WHOIS data (stability of the site and its content) Information about name servers (purpose of the site and its content) Issues with using WHOIS information Privacy concerns False registrations Inaccurate information Obsolete sites Lack of history Internationalization No central WHOIS server list Differing result formats from different WHOIS servers Some tips that will leverage WHOIS information Register your domains for 5 years o...
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Book Notes - Peopleware - Productive Projects and Teams
2007-07-18 18:29:00
So, while I was at the beach this week, I finally finished "Peopleware - Productive Projects and Teams " by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. As I read through the book, I kept having these moments where I thought that the two authors were walking with me through my days at work. There were some major themes that were threaded throughout the book, and I think we all need to keep them in mind. This is a summary of the starred sections, underlined bits, and notes that I took while reading. Keep in mind that these are short clips from the book. The book goes into much greater detail and explains the arrival at each of their points. Also, this is a summary of the points that the author has made, and are not necessarily a reflection of my position, opinion, or belief. Managing the Human Resource Development is not a production line, and the people who do development work are not replaceable parts Most times, when management talks about productivity, the actual result is getting more...
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Web 2.0 Goes Corporate - Enterprise 2.0
2007-07-17 18:27:00
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_prin t/SB118194454386837188.html http://online.wsj.com/public/article_prin t/SB118194536298737221.html While I was sitting on the beach of Ocean Grove NJ this week, my wife and I read the Technology section of the Wall Street Journal from June 18. This was a very intriguing article. It describes how IBM has embraced the idea of Web 2.0 . A good definition of Web 2.0 is the new interactive social networking of the Internet. Applications like Blogger, Wikipedia, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Reader, and Del.icio.us are all examples of Web 2.0 applications. Now imagine how a corporation could leverage each of these. Before we examine how these could be used within a corporate environment, let's examine the function that each of these Web 2.0 sites serve (these have been "borrowed" from each of the sites above, and slightly modified to be more generic): Blog - a web site where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chron...
More About: Corporate , Enterprise

5 Serious Server Side SEO Specs
2007-07-15 18:26:00
http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blog/more/ A234_0_1_0_M/ Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since your site was crawled last. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead. DNS Resolution – If there are any consistent DNS resolution issues while the crawler is trying to index the site, it may run into enough trouble to stop trying to index your site, and stop returning later to try again. Your web server should be configured to accept all requests for a domain whether they have the www or not. For example, non-www requests should be 301 redirected to the www domain. If you have a static IP for your site, ensure that the IP address resolves to the site. If it does not, this will cause problems as well To save time, many crawlers will cache the IP of a domain and simply request the domain by IP rather than a full DNS request each time it wishes to index t...
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The Relationship Between SEO, SEM and Web Analytics
2007-07-13 18:21:00
I think it would be best to start with some definitions so that we have a base level to begin with. So, I have gone to Wikipedia and grabbed their definitions: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet Marketing that seeks to promote web sites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine results pages (SERPs) and has a proven Return on Investment (ROI). Pay Per Click (PPC), or Paid Placement, is an advertising model used on web sites, advertising networks, and search engines where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's web site. Paid Inclusion is a search engine marketing product where the search engine company charges fees related to inclusion of web sites in their search index. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are financial and non-fi...
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6 Sources for SEO and Successful Server Redirects
2007-07-09 15:18:00
The rundown on 301 and 302 redirects http://www.seotoday.com/browse.php/catego ry/articles/id/477/index.php http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/0072 33.html Redirect Checker http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.ph p HTTP Status Code Checker http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/heade rs.asp Code Samples http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-r edirect-scripting.asp Spider Catching & Cloaking http://www.sitepoint.com/article/spider-c atching-asp If you are going to move your site, 301 redirects are the recommended practice. These are best understood by search engine crawlers, and happen before the content of the page is rendered for the crawler or the user Meta redirects are generally considered bad practice for search engine optimization purposes, as they are followed on the client side, and not by the crawlers 302 redirects are considered acceptable practice, but only if the content is moving temporarily, as both pages will remain in the crawler index For ASP.Net users, serv...
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Technorati , Bloglines, & del.icio.us
2007-07-08 22:00:00
Scott Hanselman has a great post about how to keep you blog from sucking... http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BlogInteres ting32WaysToKeepYourBlogFromSucking.aspx So... I have followed a number of his suggestions. I have signed up with Technorati .com . Technorati is a great place to list your blog. It is not a search engine, but it is a way to claim your blog and add it to its search listings. Here is my Technorati Profile. And, if you want to view my blog from within Technorati instead, you can do that too. And what timing, too! When I signed up for Technorati, I found a blog post about my blog in just wonky, Rob Fuller's blog. Thanks, Rob for the kinds word and the inbound link should help a bunch! Bloglines is similar to Google Reader and Technorati. It allows you to sign up for blogs and RSS feeds, and aggregates them for you to read. It also allows you to claim your blog, and includes it in its index for searching and advertising. I now have a Bloglines account as well,...

10 Tips to Easily Blend Your Content and Your SEO Keywords
2007-07-07 20:00:00
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.htm l?page=3625720 http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page= 3530366 http://www.graphicstudio.com/engines_tips .htm Site content should actually contain the keywords you choose... actually a better way to think about it is that your keywords should be chosen based on your site content It is important to drive home a very important point – forcing keywords into places that do not belong will be clearly evident to indexers, crawlers, and your readers. Be sure your keywords fit naturally within their locations. Think "specific keyword phrases" not "keywords". Due to the extreme amount of competition for general terms in the search engines, if your keyword phrases are too general it is very unlikely you will rank well in the search engines. You stand a far better chance to rank well for specific phrases where there is less competition. The resulting traffic, since it is more highly targeted, should also be much higher quality too! Keywords shoul...
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10 Essential Site Organization and Structure SEO Tips
2007-07-06 20:00:00
Organize according to themes and logic based on your keywords phrases (key phrases can also be a single word). Use book-like structure, with chapters and blocks delegating importance. Each page should have one concept, i.e. - one or maximum two main key phrases that are more important than the rest. A single, unified concept (without additional data) will greatly increase weighting (importance) of that page in the world of pages that exist for that key phrase. Content Layering http://www.seomoz.org/blog/layering-conte nt-to-maximize-visibility It is generally recommended to keep as flat a structure as possible when planning your web site presence. That does not mean however you need to throw everything in the root directory for best results. You should not go more than 2-3 levels deep in your directory structure. Each major theme or category should become a subdirectory within the root. This is a simple, easy, efficient way to organize your site. To increase visibility, each la...
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5 More Query String SEO Tips You Need To Read
2007-07-05 22:00:00
I have been asked to post some information regarding my resources for my query string post. The original post is located here - http://btw73.blogspot.com/2007/06/seo-tip -querystrings.html So the resources that I used when compiling my information were the following sites: http://blog.tripledogs.com/?p=76 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ bin/answer.py?answer=35769 http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/viewt opic.php?p=131401 http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/s earch_engine_friendly_urls/ Here are also a number of other issues to consider when constructing URLs (note that some of this is subjective and not necessarily related to SEO): http://www.seoconsultants.com/articles/10 00/urls.asp Dirty URLs - Complex, hard-to-read URLs are often dubbed dirty URLs because they tend to be littered with punctuation and identifiers that are at best irrelevant to the ordinary user Dirty URLS are bad because: Dirty URLs are difficult to type Dirty URLs do not promote usability Dirty URLs ...
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SEO Tip - View State in ASP.Net
2007-07-03 22:00:00
View state is nothing but an ASP.Net way to keep and maintain form data between server request and response. There is a hidden text box which carries this information on the page. Since some search engine crawlers only read the top x number of characters of a page, having view state at the top of the page could affect your page rankings http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum47/204 4.htm There are a number of different ways that you can minimize the affect of view state on your page rankings: Eliminate view state from your pages if it is not necessary If view state is necessary, be sure that view state is at the bottom of the page and as small as possible http://www.madskristensen.dk/blog/AnHttpM oduleThatMovesViewState ToTheBottom.aspx Scott Hanselman outlines a method to zip / compress view state http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ZippingComp ressingViewStateInASPNET.aspx
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SEO Tip - Alt tags for images
2007-07-03 00:00:00
Users on slow connections will see the ALT text until the image downloads. If the image fails to load in the user's browser, the ALT text appears. People using text browsers or browsers with images turned off will see ALT text instead. Alt tags also make your site more accessible to visually impaired people using text readers. Even if your web site is content rich, the alt tags allow you to reinforce what is highly important, the key terms, within the content. People with disabilities visiting your site should not be subjected to an hour of the same keywords being repeated to them over and over again via a screen reader. Be sure to use the keyword phrases that you also used in the copy of your page, title tag, Meta description, and other tags. Do not try to stuff all your keywords into the "alt" attribute. It is recommended using no more than 2-3 per image. Describe the image - do not just list keywords. ALT tags are currently considered by all 4 major engines in their pag...
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eBay Entrepreneur
2007-07-02 22:00:00
Well, I had posted the Transformers on eBay that my brother and I found at my parents house. They went very quickly, and fairly successfully. Eleven of the fifteen I posted were sold successfully. There were 35 people watching the Optimus Prime and Devastator auctions each. Most of the others had five to ten watchers. Slag, Warpath, Brawn, Snarl, Hot Rod, Thrust, Hound, Skids, Windcharger, Optimus Prime, and Devastator all sold. Twin Twist, Topspin, Grapple, and Astrotrain did not sell. I will try to repost them this weekend. I want to be sure I stay on the wave of the movie - it is free advertising and the demand is high for Generation 1 Transformers. I saw advertisements to eBay for G1 Transformers on the Gizmodo and Engadget web blogs, as well as a permanent link on the eBay home page. I also posted a number of my comic books this weekend. I posted them in lots of five to ten comics. The included lots of Spawn, McFarlane Spider-Man and Eastman & Laird's original Teena...
More About: Entrepreneur , Ebay

Blast from the Past
2007-07-02 20:00:00
So this weekend I went to a wedding for a good friend at work. His name is Frank Thompson. It turns out that he is the uncle of an old friend of mine. I grew up in Rutgers Village, a small neighborhood in New Brunswick, N.J. right where U.S. 1 and Route 18 meet. The neighborhood is on the border of East Brunswick and New Brunswick, and has always been in an appealing spot. It has an East Brunswick location, with New Brunswick taxes. There is a water pumping station, a stream, a fire house, and a small elementary school all right in the neighborhood. The Fire Chief, much of the police force and fire men, and the part-time mayor all live in this small neighborhood. Crime has been fairly low, and the neighborhood is kept fairly well. I moved to the neighborhood when I was 7 years old. I used to walk to Woodrow Wilson Elementary School, right in the neighborhood. I played in the three-team baseball league. I was in the neighborhood cub scout troop. I used to ride my bike all ...
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SEO Tip - Yahoo’s robots-nocontent tag
2007-07-02 05:53:00
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/00044 4.html http://searchengineland.com/070502-132315 .php This new tag provides a way to flag that part of your page shouldn't be included in an index Use the tag (technically, it's an attribute) to surround text you do NOT want included in searchable content within Yahoo <div>Text that will not be indexed by the Yahoo Search Engine</div>
More About: Robots

SEO Tip - Meta Tags - Part 5 - Other Meta Tags
2007-06-28 23:00:00
Character Set This tells the browser what character set to use to display the characters, or letters, on your web page meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" Language This indicates to the search engines what language this content is associated to. This helps search engines display language-specific versions of your page to the right users META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" CONTENT="en-US" Author The Author Tag should contain the name of the company that owns the site. This tag will help you get a very high position for your company's name. META name="author" content="Bristol-Myers Squibb" Expires This tag should only really be used if you have a dynamically driven site, or if your content changes so frequently, you do not want it to be cached META name="Expires" content="Mon, 22 Jan 1973 12:58:00 GMT" META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE" Link It is helpful for search results to reference the beginning of the collection of documen...
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SEO Tip - Meta Tags - Part 4 - Robots
2007-06-28 22:00:00
Allows or disallows indexing into search engines by robots or crawlers on a page-by-page basis This is very different from the robots.txt file. The Robots Meta tags will not be seen if the robots.txt file blocks indexing, since the crawler will never get that far. You can find out more about this meta tag at : http://www.robotstxt.org http://searchengineland.com/070305-204850 .php http://searchengineland.com/070228-140603 .php Here is a list of all the attributes for the robots tag: NOINDEX - prevents the page from being included in the index. NOFOLLOW - prevents crawlers from following any links on the page. (Note that this is different from the link-level NOFOLLOW attribute, which prevents crawlers from following an individual link.) NOARCHIVE - prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results. NOSNIPPET - prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results, as well as prevents caching of the page. NOODP - blocks the Open D...
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SEO Tip - Meta Tags - Part 3 - Keywords
2007-06-28 20:00:00
Words or categories that identify what the page is about As time has progressed, the misuse of keywords has encouraged search engines to rely less and less upon them. There is still debate about how much of an impact keywords have on SEO. Some SEO experts have recommended putting your important keywords first. This can’t hurt. Google, and many other search engines, stores location information for all hits and so it makes extensive use of proximity in search. Include common plural forms of your keywords Include common misspellings of your keywords A good rule of thumb for the keyword tag is 1000 characters or less Repeating your keywords too many times can do more damage than good. Once or twice is fine, with different spellings or with misspellings. <meta name="keywords" content="HTML meta tags metatags tag search engines internet directory web searching index catalog catalogue serch seach search engine optimization techniques optimisation ranking positioning promotion mar...
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SEO Tip - Meta Tags Part 2 - Description
2007-06-28 19:00:00
The Description Meta Tag should be a brief summary of the contents of the page Keep this concise, as if it gets too long it could be truncated. A good rule of thumb for the description tag is 200 characters or less Here is a good example: <META name="description" content="Search Engine Optimization Best Practices">
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SEO Tip - Meta Tags - Part 1 - Overview
2007-06-28 17:41:00
Meta tags are page elements that help a search engine to categorize your page properly. They are inserted into the HEAD tag of the page, but a user cannot directly see them (other than by viewing the HTML source of the page). Meta tags should be applied to each page, should be unique to the page, and should match the page’s contents Any keyword phrases that you use that do not appear in your other tags or page copy are likely to not have enough prominence to help your listings for that phrase Meta tags are not the be all and end all of SEO, and are not a magic bullet. However, they are one tool in an entire toolbox that you can use together to optimize your pages Overuse or misuse of Meta tags can do more damage than good. Keep meta tags simple, relevant, and concise
More About: Tags , Part , Meta , Overview

Web Analytics Life Cycle - Phases
2007-06-28 05:38:00
1. (Re)Define While reading Avinash Kaushik’a Blog, I found this article on defining the business purposes of your web site - http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/02/ge tting-started-with-web-analytics-step-one -glean-macro-insights.html. Defining the business goals of your web site boils down to answering one simple question - What do you want them to do on the web site? Here are some questions to help you answer that question… Why does your web site exist? E-commerce Promotional material Contests Etc. What are your top three web strategies that you are working on? paid campaigns registered users affiliates updating content on the site trying to get digg’ed effective merchandising etc. What do you think should be happening on your web site? This is where you define your key performance indicators. Your KPIs need to correlate directly to the web strategies that you have defined. I will spend more time talking about KPIs in another post, but here are three basic ques...
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Web Analytics Life Cycle
2007-06-28 05:16:00
I got the idea one day in the car as I was driving home that Web Analytics is a continuous improvement process. This is not a profound idea, but struck me at the time as being very important. It is not a process that you go through once. The value of Web Analytics is to cycle through the process more than once. This is what makes your web sites better at achieving their goals. Going through the cycle just once and getting the results has almost no value. I have looked online, and I have not found anyone who has defined a lifecycle for applying Web Analytics. So I have put one together here, very briefly. It is based on lots of other methodologies, such as the software development lifecycle and iterative development methodologies. The standard Deming Continuous Improvement Cycle phases are Plan, Do, Check, Act. I have mirrored these steps in my idea of a Web Analytics Life cycle (Re)Define business goals Collect data to measure those goals Analyze the results of the metrics Adjust ...

New Book - Web Analytics: An Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik
2007-06-27 05:14:00
Avinash Kaushik is a leading Web Analytics expert and practitioner. His first book has been highly anticipated and well received. You can go to the book's web site at http://www.webanalyticshour.com/ , or read reviews and buy the book on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Web-Analytics-Hour - Avinash-Kaushik/dp/0470130652. He is also the author of a famous Web Analytics bog called Occam's Razor at http://www.kaushik.net/avinash. I plan on both getting the book, and subscribing to the blog.
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SEO Tip - The Title Tag
2007-06-27 05:10:00
The title tag is one of the most important SEO tools in the toolbox. Changing the title tag is one if the easiest changes to improve page rankings The title of your page is stored in the HEAD tag of your HTML page It should describe the specific contents of the page, and be as unique as possible This will be the title of the page that is shown by the Search Engines to the users Important things for the title tag to contain are Company names or Brand names Other important things to include are keywords from the keywords meta tag that are relevant to the page that fit naturally in the title Here is a good example: <title>SEO Article - Make a title tag that search engines will like</title>
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SEO Tip - Use robots.txt file
2007-06-26 05:08:00
Robots.txt files tell Search Engines what should and should not be crawled NOTE – This is very different from the Robots Meta Tag. The crawler will see this file before it tries to call the page, so this file will override the Robots Meta tags on the pages. Robots.txt files should be stored in the root directory Remember, the point of the robots.txt file is to exclude pages from being crawled. So if a page or directory is banned, it will never even get to see what code is on those page(s). Accordingly, no code of those pages could change the bots behavior to re-index the page. So, robots.txt will overwrite the meta and robots tags on the page. More information regarding robots.txt can be found at http://www.robotstxt.org Sample robots.txt file to allow all pages to be crawled: User-agent: *Disallow: With one minor adjustment, you can prevent all robots from indexing your site: User-agent: *Disallow: / Here is a sample that will not index a specific directory for the Googleb...
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All Grown Up...
2007-06-25 05:06:00
Well, it was bound to happen. I have had many hobbies over the years, and since I have gotten married my hobbies have not gotten the attention that they used to. I used to collect comic books, baseball cards, hockey cards, play Warhammer 40K, Magic: The Gathering, and read massive amounts of Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels. This weekend, while at my parents' house, my brother found an old box of Transformers. The ones from the mid 1980's. The movie is coming out very soon, if it is not out already, and we both thought it would be a good idea to put them up on eBay. A few months ago, I sold all my old camera equipment from college, and it sold very well. So I spent this past weekend posting photos of all of our old Transformers hoping that it will do the same. This has inspired me to start to clean house. I still collect coins (a very light collector, compared to most other numismatists), but I figured it was time to get rid of most of my other collections. So, I have been photographing ...
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SEO Tip - Use Sitemap.xml files
2007-06-24 05:04:00
Site Map files are a new standard for search engines. You can create an XML file as part of your site, search engine crawlers can find them, and the file helps define pages and their relation to each other More information is available at http://www.sitemaps.org The Sitemap file should typically go in the root directory of your site http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml Each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB If you need to provide more than 50,000 URLs or the file goes over 10MB, you must provide more than one sitemaps file. You will then need to list each Sitemap file in a Sitemap index file. Sitemap index files may not list more than 1,000 Sitemaps and must be no larger than 10MB. http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml All URLs listed in the Sitemap must use the same protocol (http, in this example) and reside on the same host as the Sitemap Some ideas on automating the creation of the sitemap.xml file These pa...
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SEO Tip - Hyperlinks
2007-06-23 05:02:00
Hyperlinks are the nervous system of a crawler. Crawlers follow these links to determine which pages of your site should be crawled. If your hyperlinks are broken or unusable, this will prevent your pages from being crawled. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100). JavaScript for navigation is bad, as I described in the JavaScript section. Dynamic links created by JavaScript cannot be followed by a crawler. Image maps for navigation are also bad. Since the navigation is based on an image, crawlers may not be able to process the links properly, and will not follow them to their referring pages Broken links are obviously bad as well. If the link is broken, that page will not be crawled or indexed, and will not be found by your search users. You should check your site with a Link Tester to prevent this from happening. The search engines basically figure that if you are linking to something from your page, whatever it is you are linking to is likely to be...

SEO Tip - Querystrings
2007-06-22 05:01:00
The treatment of querystrings is a controversial topic amongst SEO experts. This should add a bit of insight onto how querystrings really affect SEO. If Google and other search engines couldn’t traverse dynamic sites, then huge swaths of the Internet such as online databases, blogs, threaded discussion forums, and e-commerce sites (to name a few) would go unlisted Querystrings were frowned on initially by search engines because querystrings could define an infinite number of pages, and the crawler could choke. Google has never had this problem, and querystrings, if managed correctly, can be used successfully on any site. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines says not to use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as they don’t include these pages in their index. According to Matt Cutts, the number of querystring parameters should be limited to one or two

SEO Tip - File Names, Directory Names, and Directory Depth
2007-06-21 04:59:00
The physical directory structure and names of your files can have an impact on the success of your Page Rank and keyword success. Whether it helps or not to put your keywords in your URLs is a debatable point. If you're doing a logically organized, SEO-oriented site, each page is going to be associated with a main key phrase regarding what that page is about. It makes sense to carry that over to the URL name as it makes it much easier to mentally associate the content and the URL name so you can find whatever page it is that you need to deal with. Google wants to follow patterns of (natural) human nature for showing us results, so this would only be logical to make sure that your file names and directories make sense when organizing your material in your site. On the contrary, artificially inflating your file names with your keywords would not be a good idea (not natural), and might do harm to your rankings. Always use hyphens and not underscores in your URLs. This includes files n...
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