Amazon's URLs: some reflections on URL rewriting

URL rewriting, SEO friendly URLs, PHP: these are the topics that I'm currently testing while developing a local CMS with PHP and MySQL. Then I stumbled on something beatiful: Amazon's URLs. I mean, these URLs are really interesting because they show a good way to handle dynamic URLs while dealing with search engines. For example, I found this URL on Google top results:

http://www.amazon.com/PHP-Architects-Guide-Design-Patterns/dp/0973589825

Did you notice how it works? The title of the item has been turned into a dashed-delimited sequence (word-word) and it's put before the actual item's ID (which is a sequence of numbers always starting with 0). By doing so, the problem of directory recursion is avoided, because a SE finds the title first (more significant) and then the remainder of the URL (this part doesn't matter, because it contains no keywords). A great lesson from Amazon!

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