I'm in the middle of building a site that links to a specific real estate listing based on the id in my database. ex: listing.php?listing_id = 3
Is it worth it to add a different useless variable, something like:
address = 'blah_blah' or
city = 'blah'
to increase SEO rating.
I could be completely off here and I know that I could configure htdocs? but I'm just looking for a quick fix right now. Will this make any difference?
If you'll submit in your sitemap:
http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.php?listing_id=3
and
http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.php?listing_id=3&address=blah_blah
as different pages to google (either by sitemap or by Google Webmasters) - you'll just cause your website damage! Google will detect these "two pages" as duplicate content and your ranking will drop. Google does not like duplicate-content, it likes uniqueness and quality. Remember: content is a king!
The more user friendly the url the higher your SEO rating would be. In your situation you do not have a user friendly url but a variable driven one, so putting more readable text will improve the readability of your URL links, this will improve your SEO ratting, but make sure that all spaces and special characters are replaced by hyphens "-"
You shouldn't look at it as "trying" to increase your rating. In the end, that mentality will hurt more than it will help. The best thing you can do is to provide unique, high-quality, helpful content. That will help you way more than trying to trick the search engines. If having relevant text/names in the URL will help your visitors, then do it. Otherwise, it honestly probably isn't worth it.