There’s a buzz around just now about new advice from Google suggesting you shouldn’t bother rewriting dynamic URL’s to look like static URL’s. Some SEO people are suggesting that having a people-friendly URL is more likely to get you a click from the serps than if people see a long dynamic URL. Also, some people link to you using your URL as the anchor text. Much prettier, and more likely to help boost rankings if you’ve got a real page name in there.
However, that’s not the thrust of this. Google state that they are best placed to work out how to remove unnecessary arguments in the URL such as the Session ID. They go on to suggest that if you do a bad URL rewrite that includes a session ID in a static URL-style format then you’re only setting yourself up for problems e.g. duplicate content penalties (not that they’d admit there is such a thing).
In the example they give they suggest that in a dynamic URL, Google will strip out things like session ID’s and search queries that have been included in the URL and display what’s left.
What’s to stop them stripping out other arguments that they deem irrelevant but are critical to the display, tracking or content shown on your website?
Can you trust them to get this right? Or maybe we’re all better off ensuring we mod_rewrite our dynamic URL’s.
