SEO strategy with hundreds of products

[MortimerJazz]

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Morning all,

Now I know from a strict SEO standpoint, all of the products on my site should have clear, SEO-friendly URL's. Something along the lines of:

http://www.mydomain.com/clothes/white-t-shirts.

However, if I've got literally hundreds of products on my site (and therefore using a database), I feel like the only way I'm going to be able to display these products efficiently is to use paramaeters in my URL.

Something like:

http://www.mydomain.com/clothes/product.php?id=3153

Now my question is, how seriously is this sort of URL structure going to affect my search rankings?

Will Google only be able to search product.php (and effectively find zero products), or will it still be able to search the page listed above (assuming I have internal links pointing to it) and find that product 3153 is a white t-shirt, for example.

How do most people handle SEO when you've got a load of products in your database that need listing?

Thanks very much in advance for your help.

[findlite]

Is it possible to split categorys?

http://www.mydomain.com/clothes/red-.../a-team-shirt/

The SEO advantage would be worth the extra work!

[MortimerJazz]

Is it possible to split categorys?

http://www.mydomain.com/clothes/red-.../a-team-shirt/

The SEO advantage would be worth the extra work!

Thanks for the response.

Even if I split categories though, will I be able to load pages dynamically?

It just seems like a LOT of extra resource to give each page its own unique pure HTML page when the liklihood is that items are going to be constantly added and removed based on availibity and conversion rates etc.

[BenFox]

Having the static URL makes a significant difference - both on long tail and head terms. It's not totally compulsory but if you hired anyone to do an SEO audit of your site they would recommend it.

I'm not a techy type but can you not use a URL rewriter to automatically generate them?

[jmd4eva]

uh, use wordpress, custom permalinks and parent/child categories...

[confuscius]

Will someone get rid of the multiple user spam and ban their IP!

[BenFox]

/signed

I didn think to report it all but there's a 1 minute cool down period after you've reported one.

[ChrisJohnson]

Removed Guys, thanks!

[quids4free]

and they return to spam the same thread :/