How do search engines treat query strings?

Question

Do search engines treat different page.php?querystring 's differently than different pages (eg page1.php vs page2.php )?

I've heard it recommended to have different pages in these cases for SEO purposes.. Any reason behind that?

Answer 1

Pages with query strings are not as easy to read, and remember. To my knowledge, Google does not treat query strings any differently than urls like page1.php .

The whole SEO issue is that it is easier to use and remember urls like

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6406236/how-do-search-engines-treat-query-strings

than

http://stackoverflow.com/index.php?questions=6406236&name=how-do-search-engines-treat-query-strings .

Answer 2

Colum is generally right. Another point is that if you have, say a wordpress blog, and you had myblog.com/?p=1 as a url, it would include less keywords in the url than having the full title in the url. Once you open the door of including words in urls, urls without a bunch of amper signs and equals look better.

Search engines highlight/make bold search keywords in the results they return, so that tends to make people put keywords in the url of a page. Then, you have hybrids, like what stack does, that use combination of both, digits and words. Digits make queries faster, pretty urls make people happy.

Answer 3

Google's own "Search Engine Submission Starter Guide" suggests that real words, in simple-to-understand URLs are best.

It's a PDF: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

(See pages 8-11)