Dynamic URLs and Search Engine Optimisation

There has been a lot of talk recently about the use of Dynamic URLs and their impact on the Search Engine Optimisation of a website.

Google recently blogged about the use of dynamic URLs and they recommend that rewriting URLs is not needed to enhance your rankings in Search Engines and help the Googlebot to crawl your site more efficiently.

In this Blog Google stats the following reasons for not rewriting your URLs

1. Dynamic URLs can be crawled by Googlebot so there is no need – Google states that when it reads dynamic URLs, the Googlebot gleans useful information about the content.
2. The rewriting process can create more problems than it solves
3. If you want to present static URLs then they should have static content on them.

However, there has been a lot of reaction in the SEO industry to this blog as experience has shown us that the rewriting of dynamic URL can be beneficial to the Search Engine Optimisation of your site on a number of levels.

1. Dynamic URLs offer lower keyword prominence and relevance
2. The margin of error on Dynamic URLs is higher, including the possibility of the end of the URL being lost, generating a 404 error page.
3. Research shows there is a lower click through rate by users in the search results if they see a long hard to understand dynamic URL compared to a short and relevant static one
4. Static URLs are much easier to remember, copy and paste and to share with other people, which can encourage your visitors to share your site with their friends and colleagues
5. Most search engines handle static URLs better than dynamic ones and if you look at results in Yahoo! for a given keyword search it seems that most of the highly ranked results have the keyword you’ve search for in the URL
6. If your web management tool automatically creates dynamic URLs and you then create static pages with static URLs for search engines, as Google suggests, the possibility of creating duplicate content is increased

Although it is true that the rewriting of URLs has pitfalls and can be time consuming, the benefits of being able to present user-friendly, keyword rich URLs is still a worthwhile process for delivering the content on your website to both users and search engines.