Sticking with Static URLs vs. Dynamic URLs
Posted on 24. Sep, 2008 by Theo in News
A lot of noise has been created by Google with its recent post in Google’s Webmaster Central Blog. Google goes into great detail explaining the difference between static and dynamic URLs and why webmasters should not worry about using dynamic URLs. In fact, Google intros the post with the following sentence:
Chatting with webmasters often reveals widespread beliefs that might have been accurate in the past, but are not necessarily up-to-date any more.
The post goes on to say how webmasters have always re-written dynamic URLs as a result of the belief that search engines can read static URLs better. Then, it tells us that even though that might have been the case at some point, it has not been the case for the past two years or so.
You can read the post at Google Webmaster Central Blog but I’d like to make a couple of comments.
First, it appears that many, if not most, are interpreting this as Google recommending that webmasters stop re-writing URLs and start using dynamic URLs. I can’t see how one comes up with that conclusion from this post. The more reasonable conclusion to come to is this:
If you are going to re-write the URL, do it right so the bot can crawl it properly and so you can avoid creating other indexing issues for your site.
Secondly, I think it is safe to assume that everyone’s goal, including Google’s, is to make a site more user friendly. In this case, clearly, a re-written user friendly URL, such as www.example.com/your-product-name-here.html is much friendlier to the user than www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/language/en/answer/3/sid/98971298178906/query
You can come to your own conclusions, but my conclusion is that if a URL is re-written properly, then it is a win-win for everyone.