Last week, I was forwarded a blog post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog about the use of URL rewritten URLs (for your dynamic querystring driven pages).
After having read the article and being asked a couple questions from friends and colleagues, I responded with the following:
My belief from both a SEO and Usability perspective is that…
- URL Rewrites are good
- SEO – it gives a place to use keywords (which in the past has been useful) and have more meaningful URL structures other than index.html with a bunch of querystring garbage attached.
- Usability – querystring driven URLs are ‘ugly’ and take away from the user experience. I’m more likely to remember http://www.mysite.com/stuff/ than http://www.mysite.com/?id=7&content=stuff
Personally, I think Google’s message about URL Rewrites is absurd. I would also not act on this at this point in time since it is extremely new and there is no information to suggests need for imminent change. TONS of sites use URL Rewrites and it would be a major major major shift to move away from that.
In fact, it is highly likely that the blog that is reporting this change in Google thinking http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html ostensibly is using URL rewrites.
Ha. Silly.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:32 am
looking forward for more information about this. thanks for sharing. Eugene