I’m not a fan of writing about other people’s articles if you’ve got nothing new to add …. but i saw this earlier on the google blog:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html

Summary is they are saying that it is actually easier for google if you don’t use URL rewriting. Something which goes against what we’ve all been hearing from anyone who knows an ounce about SEO for a long time – as a consequence of which, I can’t remember the last time I did anything that could use URL rewriting but didn’t.

They give some good arguments, the summary of which is:

Google has improved its algorithms etc over time, and google now feel that their indexer is capable of taking a complex query string and accurately determining which bits are rubbish as far as determining page content (like session ids) and what is useful (like page or product ids). The article goes on to suggest that in many cases URL rewriting is harmful, because people strip out too many variables from the URLs or else include things like session id’s in a rewritten URL, and prevent google from working out that its a session id.

At first glance, this all makes sorry reading for those of us that have spent a lot of time/effort implementing URL rewriting on everything we do. But on second thoughts, it not as black and white as the article states, which people have been discussing in the comments.

My thoughts:

Firstly, I think they’ve made their point incorrectly in the article. I think their point is actually that most people do url rewriting badly and make it harder for google to make sense of all of the possible URLs on a site, and so they would be better off not using it and letting google sort it all out. Without explicitly stating it, the article to me says that if you do the URL rewriting well – ie: you don’t prevent google seeing anything that might be useful, and you do take away the rubbish, you should continue. But since most people don’t do this, they should give it up!

Secondly, I think the authors have (bigheadedly??) assumed that URL rewriting exists only to aid google. To me there are other reasons for it too, to name a few that come to mind:

  • other search engines – its not all about google (although I’d imagine others won’t be far behind google)
  • they look better to users – a link to /product/12/product_name.htm just seems better than a link to /product.php?id=12 – its more memorable if it appears in someone’s history, or its more likely to be clicked in Google’s search results.
  • google tell us that getting keywords into the URL is good for seo – we need URL rewriting to do this as well as to hide ugly query strings.
  • it helps to hide information about how the site is constructed.

So to me, this all says that URL rewriting isn’t dead, but we need to make sure we get it right (and the article is a good resource for explaining what “right” is). If you have the time to do that, I think you should be able to do a better job than google as you can understand the structure of your specific site, rather than letting google apply its algorithms, which however good they are, won’t be as good since google have so much ground to cover here.

However, if you haven’t got time (or the ability) to get it right, then maybe its worth not bothering at all and leaving it to google if seo is a big part of your concern?

I notice the article on the google blog still uses a rewritten URL ….