? sign in page addresses

[Shirker]

Still having problems getting my site up Google's rankings - just as we got to page 2 we've gone back down to page 5 again and I'm a bit stuck on this now. As we've fallen lower, the number of links to the site from relevant places has increased slightly but it doesn't seem to have helped. The content is the same(ish) as the old site (but it is updated and tweaked regularly to keep it fresh) which ranked really well despite few backlinks, and the terms I'm after aren't at all comeptitive, but we're buried down among the hardly-relevant detritus.

My question is, given the pages are static, does having the '?' in the page harm rankings? I just read this on Google SEO tips but has anyone ever seen improved rankings on static sites after they've removed the '?' ?

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

[Dud]

I have just been reading up on the topic and found this guide:

Possible "Speed Bumps" for SE Spiders:

    * URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
    * Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
    * Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
    * Pages requiring a "Session ID" or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
    * Pages that are split into "frames" can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Possible "Walls" for SE Spiders:

    * Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
    * Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
    * Documents accessible only via a search box
    * Documents blocked purposefully (via a robots meta tag or robots.txt file - see more on these here)
    * Pages requiring a login
    * Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

Link to guide

Dud

[Mr Anderson]

Fix your mark-up errors and see if that makes a difference. There is a little evidence that some errors may prevent Googlebot from spidering a page, and one of yours (a missing quote mark in a menu link) occurs quite early and is found across the site. I wouldn't worry too much about having a single query string as there are plenty of sites that rank very highly with them too, however if the site isn't dynamic then at some point you may as well remove them.

[Shirker]

Thanks Mr. A - the quote is back in again now

[SLEE]

afaik if your url has ? in them then as long as they arent toooo long no more than 2 deep then google can read them ok. however if you have something like page=foo then it may look at the word page as well so it is something to be careful with but it isnt a major thing to worry about.