Search engine improvements

With a prod, a kick and the occassional fortifying cup of tea, the latest Coriandr update went live in the wee hours of yesterday morning. Mainly concerned with improving site speed, nothing much will appear to have changed unless you look at the web address bar whilst browsing the site…

Can you see what it is yet?! Essentially we’ve gone through the entire site and updated all the ugly, old links with search engine friendly new ones;

old: http://www.coriandr.com/item?item=4791

new: http://www.coriandr.com/item/4791/mohair-cuff-gloves

Although modern search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) can figure out what is going on in either situation, the new links are much kinder for us humans. Search engines have got some amazingly clever algorithms for calculating a link’s ranking, and anything that improves human readability is seen as a very good thing.

Item pages aren’t the only ones benefiting from this small, but significant change; shops, profiles and categories have all received a link makeover. Any old links floating around the internet will still work of course, but who wants browse http://www.coriandr.com/results?cat=10 when the listings are probably so much nicer in http://www.coriandr.com/category/jewellery/rings?

The upshot of all this is that our search rankings for both on- and off-site links will improve, and better rankings means more exposure, and more sales for everyone!