On google webmaster blog there in a post called Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs google stated that they prefer dynamic urls to static and that url rewriting should be avoided:
“Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. ”
In my opinion that’s a big change, but this announcement did not have many follow ups in seo blogs and forums. I know that the change of the search engine algorithms is a part of the seo game, so I wasn’t concerned about it.
A few days ago they released on the same google webmaster blog the Google Seo Starter Guide was released, being noticed blogs and social media. It’s pdf containing a set of google guidelines and recommendations to help webmasters to optimize their site for search engine and to improve the site usability for their visitors. One of them attracted my attention:
“Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. Also, it can create easier, “friendlier” URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.
…
Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they’re quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible for both users and search engines can help. Some webmasters try to achieve this by rewriting their dynamic URLs to static ones; while Google is fine with this, we’d like to note that this is an advanced procedure and if done incorrectly, could cause crawling issues with your site.”
and a few recommendations:
- Use words in URLs
- Create a simple directory structure - Use a directory structure that organizes your content
well and is easy for visitors to know where they’re at on your site. Try using your directory
structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.
First of all I’m sure that having friendly URLs is good not only good for search engines but it’s good for your visitors as well. My questions is why would release google 2 contradictory recommendations, and for the moment I’m not able to figure it.
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