I just had a call with a client regarding weather or not they should choose to rewrite there sites URLs from a dynamic form. Google blogged about dynamic vs static urls back in September. This post kept coming back and getting discussed. So I shall analyse the post and give my thought on what they are going on about. Apologies if this heads into a rant! I’ll try not to.
In my eyes URL rewriting is good. It lets you rewrite from a URL such as
www.domain.com/this.php?that=123312&you=28red&sid=4742389
into something like
www.domain.com/red-cars/
thus getting you a keyword bonus for red cars.
In Google’s blog post they don’t seem to recommend doing it as it strips out the irrelevant parameters etc. True, but that is because in Google’s example they haven’t really thought about there URL rewriting syntax and in there example it just looks like it has stripped out the parameters. Google uses the following example URL
www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo?language=en&answer=3
&sid=98971298178906&query=URL
and shows examples of rewriting it to some odd looking static strings shown below
www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3/98971298178906/URL
www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/language=en/answer=3/
sid=98971298178906/query=URL
www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/language/en/answer/3/
sid/98971298178906/query/URL
www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en,3,98971298178906,URL
If they thought about there URL rewriting syntax they could have come up with
www.example.com/article/bin/this-is-the-answer/
or
www.example.com/article/this-is-the-answer/
Check that, short, snappy and easy to remember URL’s.
Google also mentions being able to understand certain parameters. You then now need to weigh this up. Google knowing the parameter values on your URL string or Google seeing a keyword rich URL? Google said that it can know the parameters additional information like
“language=en – indicates the language of the article”
my thought, you should put the page language in your meta declaration.
“answer=3 – the article has the number 3″
means nothing that. www.example.com/article/this-is-the-answer/ will still be better understood for me.
“sid=8971298178906 – the session ID number is 8971298178906″
This is useful how?
I (personally) don’t think Google thought about other highly advanced ways of URL rewriting for this post. Apache’s rewriting engine is super powerful and you can totally strip a URL of pretty much anything and replace it with pretty much anything. Its just taking the time to learn and understand it. You also need to weigh up one major option. Is it REALLY worth spending all your time and effort on URL rewriting especially if you have a online store with 50,000 products that you will need to rewrite. Or would you be better off focusing your attention on other finer details. URL rewriting can be a mammoth task.
Shane
