What does the Dynamic URLs tab provide?

The Dynamic URLs tab is available for authenticated sites and allows a site owner to provide Yahoo! Search information about the dynamic parameters available on their site. You might use URL parameters in your site to perform various functions apart from modifying the content of the page, such as,

• session ids - for tracking user sessions
• source trackers – for tracking the sources which are sending referrals to your pages and site
• format modifiers – for print formats etc

In these cases, our crawler will come across different versions of your site's URLs that are substantially, if not exactly, similar in content. This causes numerous problems:

1. Such URLs look like different documents to our crawler and create excessive crawling on your site.
2. We do our best to detect duplicates among these pages, and the detected duplicates are prevented from ranking well. However, if we are unable to detect the duplicate, this results in duplicate results from your site competing for positions in search results
3. When people link to your site with different versions of these URLs, it fragments the link referrals to your site across multiple different URLs even though it's the same page.

This feature allows you to specify what parameters on your site are dynamic parameters that are content-neutral (that is, they do not effect the content on the page) and are present for other uses. To help you get started, we also show you the parameters that we found as possible candidates in our analysis of your site crawl. You can select one of these parameters and provide actions for them.

For these parameters, you can indicate whether you'd like us to modify the URL by removing the parameter or by using a default value. For example:

1. If you use 'src' on your site for tracking traffic sources, you can ask for the parameter 'src' to be removed from the URL. This would result in URLs on your site to be rewritten as below:
   
   http://example.com/blog?src=feed - rewritten as:
   http://example.com/blog
   http://example.com/store?prod=4&src=ysm - rewritten as:
   http://example.com/store?prod=4
2. If you use 'sid' on your site to track user sessions, and your site does not support a mode without sessions, you can provide a default session id for Y! Search and all our crawlers will always rewrite your site URLs to use that session id:
   
   http://example.com/store?prod=4&sid=jnd7234x - rewritten as:
   http://example.com/store?prod=4&sid=yslurp12
   http://example.com/catalog?cat=toys&sid=kasfh234 - rewritten as:
   http://example.com/catalog?cat=toys&sid=yslurp12

We ask you to confirm the result of your action displaying the URLs we found in our index that would be affected based on looking for the parameter on which the action was requested. We apply this information to every URL of your site that we see, thus reversing the adverse effects we talked about earlier. This can result in:

1. More efficient crawl of your site, we will be crawling fewer duplicate URLs
2. Better and deeper site coverage as we will be able to use our crawler to find more new content on your site and index more unique content from your site
3. More unique content discovered also due to the ability to handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs, due to the removal of content-neutral dynamic parameters
4. Fewer chances of crawler traps
5. Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site's pages
6. Cleaner, easier to read URLs displayed in search results