Deano’s answer to: “Does having a web link like http://www.abc.com/index.php?p=page-name affect SEO?”

Simply put, yes.

Google (and other engines) will still index dynamic URLs as distinct pages. In fact, there is a great danger there: oftentimes, multiple variants of a given dynamic URL will exist, that resolve to the same content. This leads to the potential to have the appearance of "duplicate content" on your site, which can result, in the worst case, in lowered page ranking for the desired URL, in favor of some really ugly variant you hadn't intended.

In general, SEO is affected by multiple on-page and off-page factors, the primary among them being:

• Domain Age
• Keyword in Domain Name
• Keyword in URL
• Keyword in Page Title
• Keyword in Page Metadata Description Tag
• Keyword in Page Header Tag(s)
• Backlinks to Page
• Backlinks to Domain
• Backlinks from ".edu" and ".gov" domains
• Backlinks from popular internet directories (DMOZ, Yahoo!, etc)
• PageRank (for Google, though it's a good estimate of "juice" with other engines as well)
• Age in Google Cache/Days Since Last Crawl

Each one of these factors that is optimized for the targeted keyword or keyphrase helps, including a human-readable or natural-language URL.

That said, the reason why human readable matters is that such URLs generally look "static" to search engines, and confer a sense of hierarchy and organizational structure that a more dynamic/query string URL does not… And, of course, it's easier to remember why I bookmarked funnydog.site/dog/plus/bathtub/equals/funny, than, say, funnydog.site?funny=bthtub09.876#45&spampopup=yes… If I remember, I click. Not SEO in the purest sense, but great internet marketing practice, all the same.

Does having a web link like http://www.abc.com/index.php?p=page-name affect SEO?