Google says "Don't rewrite URLs"

[Karl]

What?!

http://searchengineland.com/080923-090542.php

This is flying in the face of a lot of SEO philosophy. Lots of people have rewritten dynamic URLs to appear static for what seemed like the appeasement of Google.

 

[GravyMonster]

Very interesting.

I'd be interested in seeing two duplicate sites google ranks, one with dynamic URLs and one with static just to see if there really is a difference.

 

[Conrad11]

Surely that doesn't really affect things like:

Http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?page=%page%

being rewritten to:

Http://www.mydomain.com/%page%

....also when some people rewrite their urls that do so to put keywords in the URL to get it ranked higher in google...

 

[Craig321]

Not sure why they've said avoid it, but I'm guessing it's more a case of it doesn't need to be done any more.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

I've always prefered them for my users benefit, not Google.

 

[Craig321]

I've always prefered them for my users benefit, not Google.

Definitely, it's a lot neater to re-write them. Also, a lot of people don't understand ?page=blahblah (re-written URLs are understandable and easy to remember if needed) they can also end up getting very messy.

 

[Vai]

I would assume they mean rewriting to something like www.site.com/product1.aspx is bad whereas Wiki style site.com/product1 is ok as it is mostly done for aesthetic reasons.

 

[ArmyofHarmony]

They said it is fine to rewrite URLs to remove parameters that offer no value (session IDs and referral info etc). But this is difficult to maintain.

We only remove filenames for 2 main reasons, one is so that people don't know straight away what we script things in (even though it's obvious), and the other is that our CMS pulls data dynamically from a database, and we assign a primary keyword along with it that's spat out in the URL.. with no .fileextention created