Search Engine Safe query strings

Thanks very much for your reply John.

Fortunately our server already has asapi rewrite on it (although i dont know how to configure it yet), however before I do I want to get my head round exactly what URL format I'm going to use (to make my URLs as attractive for users and google as i can)

Do you (or anyone else) have any comments to make regarding which URL format is best (from an SEO perspective):

option 1:
www.abc.com/products/car-parts/fuel-systems/1234

this option 1 - looks nice but actually points to a *virtual* page (www.abc.com/products/car-parts/fuel-systems/1234/index.cfm) that is several sub directories deep; im sure i read somewhere that the closer a page is the root the better google will rate it... so maybe this is better..

option 2:
www.abc.com/car-parts-fuel-systems/1234 or www.abc.com/car-parts-fuel-systems-1234

-less visually attractive to my way of thinking but perhaps google would rate this page higher than the option1 one?

or how about this (which had been suggested to me but i dont like)

option 3:
www.abc.com/products.cfm/car-parts/fuel-systems/1234

i dont like option 3 as it isnt www3 correct is it? although i can see how it is possibly nicer than www.abc.com/products.cfm?carpartid=1234

Any further comments would be gratefully received, than you very much indeed.

hi Nick,

whilst you handle it all in CF via stub files a much cleaner approach is to use web server rewrites. On IIS you need to purchase something called ISAPI_Rewrite and on Apache it's free called mod_rewrite.

What this does is allow the web server to pattern match your incoming url requests via regular expressions and rewrite them on the fly.

For example,

I'm currently working on a fusebox site, that has big massive query strings like

http://mysite/index.cfm?fuseaction=links.display

with mod_rewrite, I'm actually accessing the pages as;

http://mysites/links/display - much much cleaner

and you can get as complex as you like, for example to get information about a product into my URL i have one for example;

http://mysites/products/product/1234/a-super-cool-widget

and i have a rewrite rule that is then plucking out the '1234' from the URL and actually serving the page;

http://mysites/index.cfm?fuseaction=products.product&productid=1234

have a look into that and see how you get on,

edit: I should say that you have to write the rewrite rules yourself - they're not that magic and with a little bit of time you can usually get them working pretty quick.