How search engines determine the query string values for dynamic pages?

Question

I have a URL like

Abc.com/viewpage?id=1234-4655-7678;type=article

How do search engines like Google or Bing determine during crawling the value of these parameters?

The id is globally unique (GUID). Is this a problem and should I change the format or URL?

Answer 1

Search engines will only find the query string values that they are directed to. They may find these URLs through several mechanisms:

• The main way is through links. Links like this one one of your pages will cause the bots to crawl the pages with the specified IDs:

  <a href="/viewpage?id=1234-4655-7678;type=article">Article A</a>
  <a href="/viewpage?id=1234-4655-7679;type=article">Article B</a>
  

• If you publish an XML sitemap then search engine bots will crawl the URLs listed within:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
      <url><loc>http://abc.com/viewpage?id=1234-4655-7678;type=article</loc></url>
      <url><loc>http://abc.com/viewpage?id=1234-4655-7679;type=article</loc></url>
  </urlset>
  

• Some bots will submit forms on your site. So if you had a form like this, the pages might be discoverable:

  <form method=GET action=viewpage>
      <select name=id>
          <option value=1234-4655-7678;type=article>Article A</option>
          <option value=1234-4655-7679;type=article>Article B</option>
      </select>
  </form>
  

Using IDs in URLs is very common. It is not a huge problem for search engines as long as you can provide a mechanism for the URLs to be discovered.

You don't want to use IDs in your URLs that change frequently (such as user session IDs.)