Most search engine friendly URL FAQ's say stay away from ? in the URL. I also found an article thats over four years old that talks about search engine friendly URLs and specifically applies to how GeekLog does its url-rewrite.
There was previously one major drawback to this method. Google, and perhaps other search engines, would not index pages set up in this manner, as they interpreted the URL as being malformed. I contacted a Software Developer at Google and made them aware of the problem and I am happy to announce that it is now fixed.
That was
four years ago and according to the author was fixed.
So far all the articles I have ran into pretty much do it the way GeekLog does it. Except geeklog does not perform rewrites on topics, such as,
h**p://www.myglsite.com/index.php?topic=Google
I guess its possible that this may throw off a bot.
More on the
subject of url:
In addition to being more difficult to index, the URLs with the question marks in them do not take advantage of search engine algorithms that give points for search terms found in the actual URL. A URL like http://www.bookstore.com/books/legal_thriller/john_grisham/best_seller.html will receive extra points over a generic URL like http://www.bookstore.com/book.asp?ID=54321 when searching for "John Grisham books" as the keywords searched for are included in the URL.
Byte