mod_rewrite and SEO friendliness
- by John Doe
My website has an atypical structure and I'm not sure if this could create problems in the long run, specially for SEO positioning purposes.
I have a unique, large PHP script, and I use the Apache module mod_rewrite in the .htaccess file to create friendly URLs, for example:
RewriteRule ^$ /index.php?section=Main
RewriteRule ^createArticle$ /index.php?section=Main&view=CreateArticle
RewriteRule ^configuration$ /index.php?section=Configuration
RewriteRule ^article/([0-9]{1,10})$ /index.php?section=Article&view=Default&id=$1
RewriteRule ^deleteArticle/([0-9]{1,10})$ /index.php?section=Article&view=Delete&id=$1
RewriteRule ^reportArticle/([0-9]{1,10})$ /index.php?section=Article&view=Report&id=$1
RewriteRule ^logIn$ /index.php?section=Authentication
...
So, www.example.com/index.php?section=Article&view=Default&id=105 would become www.example.com/article/105.
The only real physical file is index.php, in which the parameters of the URL queried is processed and the corresponding result is outputted.
My question is, do the crawling robots (e.g. Googlebot) recognize these links? Do they index the resulting HTML outputted by index.php with the specified parameters as if it was a actual HTML file?
Also, would this become a problem when creating a Sitemap?