Education: Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs
 

Google's got a blog post out today (and SELand covers it) about how they now recommend that webmasters and site owners DO NOT rewrite their ugly dynamic URLs to be clean and static. What's the reasoning behind this?

We've come across many webmasters who, like our friend, believed that static or static-looking URLs were an advantage for indexing and ranking their sites. This is based on the presumption that search engines have issues with crawling and analyzing URLs that include session IDs or source trackers. However, as a matter of fact, we at Google have made some progress in both areas. While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.


aged article still good stuff :2 cents:

read the complete article...
:thumbsup have a good 1

no, i dont trust him/google.
i will still rewrite the urls.

Congrats to Google for being able to crawl the /?id=3&cat=4&car=11 jungle, but I certainly think they are serving their users better with /pontiac-firebird-1988.

Ridiculous post by Google IMO.

:thumbsup:thumbsup

Google just gets too full of themselves. People like to actually read the text in a URL. If you hover over a link that goes to /topic.php?t=13345 it's not very identifiable. However if you hover over a link and it says. /why-google-is-full-of-shit.php you get a better idea of where you are going.

it's also easier to navigate the hierarchy of a site when the categories are things like /porsche/ /bmw/ ect..ect rather than /112/ /123/

If you read between the lines, Google says it can crawl and index dynamic URLs while its competition cannot or has difficulty doing it. Don't rewrite dynamic URLs or it'll lose its competitive advantage.

Do a search for Pontiac firebird 1998 and see how many results have those words in the rewritten URL and how many don't.

:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup

So they are saying we don't care if you do or you don't - Same as they always said - Blahhh...

I have always done better with static worded urls. And I do mean way better.