Search Engine Safe?

The abbreviation SES is an acronym for "Search Engine Safe", meaning that search engines won't refuse to index or otherwise penalize your content page(s) for using data in the query string of the URL. So a standard link URL might look like this:

And an SES URL looks like this:

Unfortunately there are a number of problems with this. The biggest problem is that, in the early days of CGI because search engines were penalizing sites for not using SES URLs and because most dynamic sites didn't use them, that meant the search engines were NOT doing their jobs!

So pretty soon they realized that they weren't doing their jobs and the search engines changed so that they could adequately index the web as we know it.

This means that in today's web SES URLs provide NO VALUE to your website. So all that work in ColdBox and other frameworks to develop spiffy (and rather elaborate) tools to create SES URLs is WASTED.

So since the moniker "SES" is no longer accurate, because SES URLs are no more or less safe than any other URL, I propose a new more appropriate name for SES URLs. Introducing the new and improved PBW URLs!

PBW is an acronym for either PROGRAMMER BUSY WORK or PROJECT BUDGET WASTING. Take your pick, they're both equally accurate.

UPDATE Nov 3, 2008: Okay, so I knew that the search engines had changed... What I didn't realize is that Google recommends dynamic URLS. In that article, they're actually saying that attempting to rewrite URLs to be SES may make it harder for them to accurately index your site... hmmm... So actually SES URLs are really "search engine dangerous".