The beta launch of ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ in Site Explorer allows webmasters to tell Yahoo Search which dynamic parameters they would like the search engine to ignore.
Priyank Garg of Yahoo Search managed to tear himself away from MuggleNet long enough to give webmasters a heads-up on a new feature at Yahoo Search. Their Site Explorer has been updated with a beta test of Dynamic URL Rewriting. Garg explained more at the Yahoo Search blog:
The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly. So you might wonder what the feature really gives you. Utilizing the ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ feature enables:
• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better aggregation of link juice to your sites, which can help your pages rank better.
This kind of filtering should be welcomed by site publishers of all kinds who deliver content dynamically. Database driven e-commerce sites in particular should benefit from what should be much better indexing of their products by Yahoo’s crawlers.
