SEO for Dynamic URLs – Should you rewrite them to SEO friendly format ?

Google breaks one more age old concept – of rewriting dynamic URLs to “Search Engine Friendly” static URLs.

We’ve been taught that dynamic URLs are bad and passes less information to Google than static URLs which search engines love. Last day, Google gave us official, documented information that this is not the case anymore.

According to Google, the crawlers have become more clever now that it can handle pretty much all the dynamic URLs that has the extra parameters in it. It can even “decode” those ambersands and session ids to meaningful format.

Therefore, you don’t need to rewrite them to SEO friendly static formats.

However Google clarifies that, if there is dynamic content on your website (Dynamic content = Content pulled from the database on demand, on the fly), then it’s recommended that, you leaeve it as such, because Google can now understand what a session id and & sign means. When there is dynamic content, it is not fair to rewrite to static urls where we might avoid all the additional parameters.

However, if the content is not dynamic, you might want to avoid longer URLs with meaningless parameters.

Which means that webmasters should now allow and tell Google that it’s dynamic content or static content without fail, and not try to mask your content nature (dynamic or static) through URLs just for the sake of search engine friendliness.

The big picture is thus.

Dynamic Content = Dynamic (meaningful) URLs = Google – No rewrites please, we’ll separate wheat from chaff.

Static Content = Static URLs. = Google – We were smart, and will be.

So, what happens to all those who manipulated their URL’s to search engine friendly format?

Well, leave it as such if it’s complicated to go back. Just make sure, your have the URLs related to the content and not unnecessarily “SEO” optimized. Again, this depends on the site type, volume of pages, indexed content and the time you’ve got.

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