Comments on: Google & Dynamic URLs

By: Glassvibrations

Glassvibrations — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:50:06 +0000

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.

By: Irvin Ryan

Irvin Ryan — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 05:00:00 +0000

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.

By: ckata

ckata — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:13:04 +0000

@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!

By: sdrew

sdrew — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:10:29 +0000

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.