I love search engine optimization. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s amazing how we find ways to create new business for ourselves. Dynamic URLs are being used on many sites these days. If you are running a Wordpress blog, there is a good chance that you are using the mod_rewrite syntax to optimize your URLs. After all, all respected search engine optimizers claim that static URLs have an advantage over dynamic URLs. I never thought the advantage was much and Barry Shwartz piece now suggests that as well. But now Google is suggesting that webmasters should not use a rewrite method to map dynamic URLs to static ones. Here is what Google has to say:

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. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. One example would be to generate files for all the paths and make them accessible somewhere on your site. However, if you’re using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good. Feel free to serve us your standard dynamic URL and we will automatically find the parameters which are unnecessary.

So should you listen to Google? Yes and no really. Google says a lot of things that are simply not facts. Even if Google had trouble crawling dynamic URLs, they are not going to flat out admit it. In this case, I agree that Google is able to crawl dynamic URLs. I have seen it done. I remember when I told the SVP of my previous company that dynamic URLs are not the reason our SEO campaigns were not performing well. Let’s just say he wasn’t impressed by what I had to say and thought I was a complete you-know-what. But here is the thing. Dynamic URLs work almost as well as static URLs.

What Should I do?

Google does claim that dynamic URLs make it hard for them to crawl your pages properly. If you’ve had a Wordpress blog, you are probably familiar with Wordpress’ duplicate content issues. But I would still optimize my URLs to look static and have my keywords in them. Google will not be penalizing folks for going static. Google’s goal is to bring the best information to searchers. Having a static URL is not a dis-qualifier. It should never be a dis-qualifier unless you are doing black hat. But if you just have blog, and you are afraid that Google might ban you for playing with Apache mod_rewrite, think again. What about Google’s recommendation, you may ask. It’s just a guideline, and it doesn’t mean anything. Stop wasting your time worrying about things that really don’t matter and instead focus on creating content that folks will link too (like the above piece by Barry :))