Make search URL search engine friendly: hash -> what?

Question

I am developing a flight search engine for a customer, and currently the URLs look as follows (ad = destination airport, ao = origin airport, dates and number of passengers are not specified here):

http://example.com/#ad=S%C3%A3o+Paulo+-+Todos+os+aeroportos+(SAO),+Brasil&ao=Recife+-+Guararapes+Intl+(REC),+Brasil

My customer wants to make search pages more search engine friendly (SEO). The idea is that Brazilians who are looking for flights from, say, SAO to REC by e.g. Google should have a higher chance of finding that particular flight search engine.

The first step is probably replacing the fragment identifier (#) by a query string (?). The server then dynamically generates nice text content that can be viewed without JavaScript (search results would still be loaded via XHR). In my opinion, that makes a lot of sense.

Now, to make the URLs more search engine friendly:

• (A) My customer proposes adding additional keywords into the URL, something like:

  http://example.com?flights+to+Porto+Alegre&S%C3%A3o+Paulo+-+Todos+os+aeroportos+(SAO),+Brasil&ao=Recife+-+Guararapes+Intl+(REC),+Brasil

• (B) I propose adding a slug instead, which can easily be internationalized, and which is good to read also for humans. Example:

  http://example.com/pt_BR?ad=REC&ao=SAO/voos_de_Sao_Paulo_para_Recife

• (C) Or, perhaps without a slug (but - due to parsability - only for a limited parameter set, which has the disadvantage of limiting sharing of URLs by users):

  http://example.com/pt_BR/voos_de_Sao_Paulo_(SAO)_para_Recife_(REC)

What do you suggest? Any examples of good URLs for similar use cases?

That all being said: I understand that links from highly ranked pages are still the most important ranking measure. In the end, I wonder if all that complexity really is worth the effort. When I look at Google's own search pages, then they are rather simple. For example, there is no summary of the search query in a H1 tag, just as my customer wants. Of course, Google doesn't search itself...

Answer 1

• don't use _ (underscore) to delimit words. Google interprets hello_world as one word but hello-world as two words.
• don't put your human readable keywords in the query string (after the ?). Instead make it a normal URL http://example.com/pt_BR/search/voos-de-Sao-Paulo-(SAO)-para-Recife-(REC)

I would go for a something like: http://example.com/pt_BR/2012-10-28/voos-de-Sao-Paulo-(SAO)-para-Recife-(REC)