So what are Search Enginge Friendly URLs (SEFU) exactly?  In short SEFU are URLs which appear to search enginges to be static text.  With some software packages or custom implementations you'll find your URL's will have a "?" followed by the parameters needed to drive the page.  For example, on one of our websites we had the following URL: http://www.boilcrawfish.com/index.php?main_page=cook_crawfish.  Using SEFU, this gets changed to http://www.boilcrawfish.com/pages-cook_crawfish/index.html.  So know you know what SEFU is, but why does it matter?  Well, it turns out that is the subject of a great deal of debate.

You will find a lot of talk about Search Engine Friendly URLs on the web.  Some articles we read said they are an absolute must, while others said it didn't really matter.  Doing some research on sites, we noticed that URL's with parameters were showing up in search engine results.  However, we just weren't getting the crawling traffic we were hoping for.  If you're using a software package, odds are that it will be a simple flick of the switch to move over.  The question is, does it really make a difference?

In reality the answer probably varies by search enginge.  In addition since search engines are constantly changing their methods, even if we had the answer for every search engine today it may change tomorrrow.  But, given how easy it is to enable we believe that it's worth the small bit of trouble it will cause you.  See the month to month results from our site before and after SEFU:

Before SEFU