Beta launch of Dynamic URL Rewriting in Site Explorer

While visiting my Site Explorer account yesterday I discovered a new tab called “Dynamic URL’s Beta”. Without hesitation I clicked through and found that Yahoo now helps site owners to dynamically rewrite URL’s from within Site Explorer.

At the moment you can only specify up to 3 dynamic parameters that you want to have rewritten and Yahoo will automatically rewrite the URL’s containing these parameters.

As the Yahoo! Search Blog suggests, 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 URL’s 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 URL’s (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
Cleaner and easier-to-read URL’s displayed in the search results.
Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.

Some examples for rewriting your URL’s:
1. Remove these parameters from the URLs, such as in case of session ids, you could ask to remove ’sid’ from URLs
http://example.com/store?prod=1&sid=23yadh56 ==> http://example.com/store?prod=1
http://example.com/store?prod=1&sid=2jrwe89k ==> http://example.com/store?prod=1

2. Use a default value for the parameter, for example you could set the ’src’ parameter to be ‘yhoo_srch’
http://example.com/blog?src=rssfeed ==> http://example.com/blog?src=yhoo_srch
http://example.com/blog?src=footer ==> http://example.com/blog?src=yhoo_srch

I am not sure how soon they will upgrade the Beta version and increase the number of URL’s, but i am sure it will happen sometime soon.

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