[skalie]

Does a "?page=1" in ones url really sabotage one's chances with Google?

Url structure

Design code isn’t the only thing standing in the way of spiders. Long url strings also stop search engines short of reading page content. Yes, search engines CAN read dynamic websites, but we have rarely seen a dynamic site do as well as an html counterpart. Why is that? Because search engines want to know that the content they’re indexing is going to be the same content in 2 weeks and dynamic sites are just that – dynamic and potentially ever changing. So while engines CAN rank that content well, they don’t always prioritize ranking it over a clearly static content page. And the more variables a url string has “?,” “=,” “&,” the less likely it will be read.

source

[SirCastor]

Spiders tend to stop at those characters yes.
There are probably a dozen tutorials about avoiding this with some workarounds. Some are Cheap, some aren't. Do a google search for Dynamic Pages and Spiders.

[moodymonster]

I've been told that having stuff like:

?page_name=having+the+page+name+instead+of+id

is better than:

?page_id=45

Although I'm yet to use it.

using stuff like h1, h2, h3 is good as well.

Repetition of keywords.

And getting your site linked to as much as possible, and regularly adding new links into your site. All those directories that are crap for humans looking for info are good for 'bots.

Don't know what happens with some super long URL though - like Apple's store URL for example.

[skalie]

I'd also like to know why I can't clean up the BBcode in that first post.

[/quote] /= [/url]

[Chuckit]

It's usually better to have a human-readable URL scheme anyway, and it's generally easy enough in cases like page_id=1337 that the only excuse for not doing it is laziness.