Google’s webmaster central blog… updated it’s guidelines on the subject of the indexability of dynamic URLs and the practice of exploding these dynamic URLs into static ones. You can read the post here.
It’s a little confusing to say the least, they’re not being very decisive in their suggestions or instruction… a quick look at the comments posted by webmasters around the world reveals just how much controversy this is creating. Here’s an excerpt from the post…
Should I try to make my dynamic URLs look static?
Following are some key points you should keep in mind while dealing with dynamic URLs:
- It’s quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs.
- It’s much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters.
- If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL.
- If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content.
Which can Googlebot read better, static or dynamic URLs?
We’ve come across many webmasters who, like our friend, believed that static or static-looking URLs were an advantage for indexing and ranking their sites. This is based on the presumption that search engines have issues with crawling and analyzing URLs that include session IDs or source trackers. However, as a matter of fact, we at Google have made some progress in both areas. While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough 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.
I have to agree with Barry Schwartz and Danny Sullivan from SearchEngine Land… in this article. If exploding URLs currently works for you, then there’s not much point in changing them back to Dynamic structures and having to fiddle about with re-directs…etc.
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