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I have read questions about URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools in this site and the Google Webmaster Help Center but I have a problem.

My site searches in the database and show some information.

These two URL display some data:

http://mydomain.com/index.aspx?category=business
http://mydomain.com/index.aspx?category=graphic&City=Paris
  1. In URL parameter section, I can only define parameter category, how Google can detect proper values (business, graphics, real estate...)? Every word is not valid for search.
  2. If My page name is default.aspx or anything else, where I should define it?
  3. If I use URL rewriting like http://mydomain.com/search/category/business, my settings must change?

1 Answer 1

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The purpose of the url parameters feature is to let you help Google identify URL parameters which affect (or don't affect) the content on the page. So in your case the URL parameter you'd setup would be category. You don't need to tell it possible values for that parameter, or the page filename, Googlebot will work that out for itself as it crawls your site.

If you were to start using URL rewriting then yes the settings would change, but this wouldn't break anything, Google would just start crawling the new URLs (assuming they are linked from somewhere).

You generally only need to use this feature if Googlebot is incorrectly indexing your pages with URL parameters, something that would be indicated in webmaster tools.

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  • Thanks for your answer.Therefore this is not Ideal for index dynamic content.How can I index my dynamic information (values that will display after searching e.g: http://mydomain.com/search.aspx?category=business)
    – Werewolf
    Apr 19, 2013 at 14:01
  • If the pages only appear after searching, you either need to link to them from somewhere on your site (perhaps from a 'popular searches' page), or add them to your sitemap (possibly both). Apr 19, 2013 at 14:18
  • No,The Page Exists in sitemap, but without searching it's empty. http://mydomain.com/Search.aspx will have a blank content but http://mydomain.com/Search.aspx?category=business will display results.I want to index this generated page values in Google.
    – Werewolf
    Apr 19, 2013 at 19:47
  • Yup, so you need http://mydomain.com/Search.aspx?category=business in your sitemap too. Apr 19, 2013 at 20:00
  • Oops,Great Solution! is there any solution to index more pages returned by the query.e.g http://mydomain.com/Search.aspx?Category=business returns 100 pages, and other pages retrieved by this pattern http://mydomain.com/?Search.aspx&Page=X
    – Werewolf
    Apr 20, 2013 at 13:49

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