The battle in forums and on blogs on how Google handles dynamic versus static URLs has been going on for some time now. But recent comments from Google have both clarified and confused most webmasters. If you’ve spent any time rewriting URLs to accommodate user-friendly URL structures, Google is now saying “it’s not necessary”.
Google is suggesting that it is now not necessary for webmasters to rewrite URLs. The Google Webmaster’s Blog stated “… we at Google have made some progress in both areas. While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of click through 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.”
The post also debunked a myth that “dynamic URLs cannot be crawled“. Google is now asking that webmasters give them the opportunity to analyze these URLs to determine the value of the content.
In fact, Google is recommending that webmasters do not rewrite URLs at all, stating that “If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static.”
You can read the entire post on the Webmasters Blog here.
While this removes much pain and aggravation for webmasters, there is this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me to beware.
What is your opinion?
