Adsense Friendly URLs

Which of the following similiar URLs more Adsense and SEO friendly

wvw.domain.com/article/hybrid_car_information/101

OR

wvw.domain.com/article/hybrid_car_information.phph?a=101​

(the first URL treats article number as part of the path, the second treats it a as passed parameters as part of the query string)

I'm guessing they are equivalent, but I am not certain how Adsense's crawler deals with query strings. Does anyone?

 

You're asking the wrong question. You should be asking which of those URLs is more human-friendly. Google can handle both without any problem. Always go for the human-friendly version whenever possible. Personally I think that too many sites expose unnecessary details about how they are implemented. All the URLs on my site end in .html, but they're actually JSP pages. But why would the user care?

 

I am not a BIG expert on this but I think the second one is the best. Most search engines handle these pages well and url rewriting is said to be something of the past. The top url is one directory deeper so I'd go for the second...

 

The first one of course because it doesn't have a variable, but it really doesn't matter their both friendly.

 

Also, change the underscores ('_') to hyphens ('-') for better keyword separation. Matt Cutts mentioned a while ago that the Google crawlers work better with hyphens than underscores.

 

So the "evolving consensus" of this thread is that, though URL hints may no longer be significant influencers of Search Engine placement, the following factors might effect the extent to which URLs are taken into account:

1. Directory depth

2. Passed variables

3. Dashed over Underscored names​

I have been experimenting with both of the syntaxes included above as well as a non-English URL and have not yet come to any conclusions myself.

Another issue related to URLs that I haven't seen anyone discuss, is that generic scripts that dynamically create content passed on variables (ie, article.php?a=101 in the example) may not be as likely to get cached by Google Mediapartners as an English language file might (the ones in the example above). Clearly google has the ability to serve contextual ads in non-crawled [sic, cached] pages on the fly; perhaps the generic script generated pages are more likely to contextualized on the fly which could be why the English language option is best. (Not sure my words adequately explain my thoughts, but I tried.)