How do you add url to a page?

I'm building a website that contains sorting when navigating from page to page. Should I add the sorting parameter to the URL or keep it in a cookie for SEO so that the same page URL is linked to everytime?

• The advantage of using a sorting parameter is that I can cache the entire page. Another option is to keep the page static by adding ajax calls for links that use the sorting algorithm, however this affects the ability to crawl the site for links I believe.

• Answer:

  I'm assuming there's a default sorting order which is displayed to a first time user on page load.  Standard practice would be to have this version served by default and this version is available to even those visitors without javascript enabled (the default way in which the search engine robots crawl webpages). The ajax implementation you mention should work much better than appending the sorting parameters to the url. The search engine will crawl the page using the default sorting order as long as you implement the sorting update to the columns as ajax and not some funky iframe madness. Most MVC/CRUD frameworks handle what you're trying to do quite elegantly. Since you brought up caching without specifying the caching framework I can only give you a rather simple response in this regard.  The URL your ajax calls to get the resorted list of links should be possible to cache. As a value added note: If you want to allow users to link to a particular sorted order of links I would suggest doing so using #anchors.