Rails 3, snowman and SEO

Question

I'm wondering how the snowman affects the SEO.

For example, if someone puts a link to your post with the snowman, it means two URLs are pointing to the same resource (the other one without snowman), and basically this is bad for search engines.

Does this really poses a problem?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 04 '12 at 18:12

1

If you care about SEO you should already have 303 redirects for normalization in place, so that both the URL with and without the snowmen end up linking to the same URL, hopefully without any query parameter.

Also, this only affect forms that use the GET method; URLs that can only be retrieved via POST request are not crawled at all.

Minor note: the snowman is no longer used in current Rails versions, now you have utf8=✓.

answered Feb 04 '12 at 18:12

gioele

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Thanks! I mean, snowman or utf-8 and either for GET or POST, someone can put by copying the URL from browser, and somehow this makes me think that it's still kind of bad. – valk Feb 05 '12 at 18:19
This is why you have 303 redirects: so that people can only copy and paste GET-able URI without strange query details. – gioele Feb 05 '12 at 19:00

Rails 3, snowman and SEO

1 Answers1