Will "ugly" page urls have a negative effect on Search engine positions?

[raysor]

On some pages on Shareworld we have very long urls (partly due to the way our cms software works).

Will this have a negative effect on search engine positions for these pages or doesnt it matter?

[webado]

it doesn't matter, as long as the links are valid (properly encoded, no funny characters used), and there is no content duplication due to reversing parameters in query strings which result in diferrent urls for the same content page.

[raysor]

Ah thanks Christina, thats just what I wanted to hear!

[JWJ]

Raysor, there is more than just SEO to consider with URL's. They should, in my opinion, also be reasonably human-friendly. If you haven't read it already you may be interested in Googles opinion of 'ugly' url's.

[raysor]

hmm thats interesting JWJ. Thanks for the link.

I am going to keep a close eye on "webmaster tools" as these ugly urls have caused a few problems (I did indeed keep getting the same page indexed several times because of several urls pointing to the same place).

I am trying to keep these ugly urls to a minimum.