Google & Dynamic URLs
September 25th, 2008 by hbond{{chris}} Google recently updated it’s webmaster guidelines to suggest that webmasters no longer re write their dynamic URLs to appear static.
This is a significant shift in SEO strategies going forward as compared to the past. The key question on every ones mind at this time is what about all my old URLs that I’ve re written? Well – don’t change them. If Google already has them indexed there is no need.
The difference lies in what you do going forward with new sites and work. According tot he search engine land post it only makes sense to leave static those URLs that you feel Google should know are not static – such as color choices for products in a database.
Also – lets not for the other search engines. While Google still has the lions share of search volume many sites still do better in Yahoo!
For more on this topic see Google Says, Don’t Rewrite Dynamic URLs To Static URLs.
I can’t understand Google’s thinking on this one Chris.
This becomes a usability nightmare. They’re wanting us to change the way we do business to suit their algorythms (paid links debacle anyone?), instead of changing the way they crawl and index pages to suit the way webmasters work.
This is not about us as SEO’s and developers, it’s about the end user experience. It’s easy for me to tell my friends or clients about this URL:
http://widgetsite.com/bigbluewidgets.html
But they’re not going to remember this one:
http://widgetsite.com/widgets.php?type=widget&size=big&color=blue
Not to mention the fact that most email clients will break extremely long URLs.
The other issue is whether we’ll see keyword stuffing replaced with URL stuffing – if google’s saying they’re happy with long URLs with parameters, what’s to stop people stuffing URLs with lots of “dummy” parameters with their keywords?
We know that (up till now anyway) a reasonable amount of weight is placed on keywords in URLs by the search engines.
@sdrew – I agree with you completely. It’s a lame comment they are making which is opening up a very large can of worms. My opinion, like yours and many others is – URL’s are meant to be easy to read. If software can do that elegantly on the server – then why the heck not!
Thanks for bringing up this very solid point!
Some people were happy about this update… and some aren’t, been reading a couple of articles about this and some benefited and some didn’t. guess it really depends on which web developers are used to.
This significant change in the strategy of google will make a remarkable change in the field of SEO. In my opinion google will lead all the search engines in future.