CF and SEO

Not sure if you've thought of this, but for almost all of the sites I do now, I use Apache's mod_rewrite to fine tune the URLs sitewide.

This would change these URLs:

mysite.com/page.cfm?page_filter=rivers
mysite.com/page.cfm?page_filter=lakes
mysite.com/page.cfm?page_filter=beaches

to these:

mysite.com/rivers
mysite.com/lakes
mysite.com/beaches

or these

mysite.com/filter/rivers
mysite.com/filter/lakes
mysite.com/filter/beaches

Not sure if you're using apache for your webserver, but if not, there are similar tools for almost all of the webservers out there.  I prefer to always hide the underlying technology of the site, and not reveal any ".cfm" extensions, or raw url variables.

A lot of people will say the latter is better then the former, but nobody really knows because the search engines do not really tell us how they rank our pages.  But many modern pages use the former method just fine and the search engines are capable of indexing them.  As long as you have real links to each version you would probably be fine.

I.E.

<a href="mysite.com/page.cfm?page_filter=rivers">Rivers</a>
<a href="mysite.com/page.cfm?page_filter=lakes">Lakes</a>
<a href="mysite.com/page.cfm?page_filter=beaches">Beaches</a>

But if you care to go on the side of caution, a trick I use on my site is this.

rivers.cfm

<cfset page_filter = "rivers">
<cfinclude template="page.cfm">

lakes.cfm

<cfset page_filter = "lakes">
<cfinclude template="page.cfm">

beaches.cfm

<cfset page_filter = "beaches">
<cfinclude template="page.cfm">

Now you have three seperate pages serving up seperate content all driven from the exact same page just using local variables instead of url variables.