Google says static URLs are not always better than dynamic URLs...

[tamecrow]

Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs

An interesting post today from the Google Webmaster Central blog. Juliane Stiller and Kaspar Szymanski from Google's Search Quality Team go into some detail on the recent progress they've made with interpreting dynamic URLs. Some interesting and popular myths are debunked and some helpful advice is given for people torn between sticking with dynamic URLs and rewriting them as static URLs.

[govindseo]

Yaa, I agree and I think Static URL are more Search engine friendly and can go some way to helping rank and they are indexed more quickly then dynamic URL.
Thanks!

[peginald]

Hmm, I have just spent a fair amount of time getting my Zen Cart site to be more SE friendly, and as part of that I have been making my URLs appear static.

Now, I don't deny that I have also been spending my time tidying titles, pages descriptions and content, but I have also been careful to create a decent structure e.g. www.mysite.com/product/the-product

I have also moved my content from a shop sub-domain the www so, I am still going through the painful period of google re-evaluating my links and working out all the 301s, but, I feel I starting to see the glimmer of ranking better. live.com certainly likes me more already.

I'm afraid I just don't buy it. I'm just can't believe that a search engine won't prefer a URL that is descriptive, rather than one that is full of meaningless garbage. I'm not sure it makes all that much difference to a user clicking on the link, but remember google highlights the relevant words in the url, so it can't do any harm!

Also, it means I can stop Google thinking I have duplicate content - I have only 100 pages on my site, but Google said it had indexed 200, due to it following the links which changed the sort order of products.

Also, and very importantly for me, I now have the option of changing my underlying technology, and keeping my URLs the same, or perhaps rolling out a test on a single product to see if a new page format improves my ranking.

OK, I am only selling 50 products and have 100 pages on the site at present, so I appreciate it isn't all that difficult for me, but I would recommend making the effort! Google can *cope* with dynamic URLs just fine - but we want to rank!

[tamecrow]

Originally Posted by govindseo

Yaa, I agree and I think Static URL are more Search engine friendly and can go some way to helping rank and they are indexed more quickly then dynamic URL.
Thanks!

That wasn't what the article said - did you read it all? Would be interested to see some experiments into static URLs being indexed quicker than dynamic ones - can you give me some examples?

[tamecrow]

peginald - An interesting case study, thanks. Would be very interested to hear how this turns out!

[peginald]

If I ever get any positive ranking results from my site, I will share my experiences ... my problem is my shop is currently an evening activity - I have a day job too, so it is taking a while....

[kgun]

Interesting topic.

This

Search Engine-Friendly URLs [PHP & MySQL Tutorials]

#1 hit for

search engine friendly urls

is a classic article from SitePoint.

There is an update in this The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition - SitePoint Books book's chapter 5 that I can reccomend:

"How do I make "pretty" URLs in PHP?".

<side note>
Chapter 11 on browser and server caching may well be worth the price of the book.
</side note>

[Jean-Luc]

I cannot believe that a company like Google comes up with this. Or was their Webmaster Central Blog hacked ?

Google should have published this post on April 1st.

Jean-Luc

[wige]

Shocked and Appalled, that is the best way I could describe my reaction at reading this posting. I am not sure what the engineers were on when they wrote this, but they should have shared before I read it.

First off, they are asking that meaningful information be left in a mangled form in the urls, in a way that is harder for users to process (skimming the results on the search page, "/widget.html" can look more relevant than "/product.php?pname=widget") and which can result in errors when other sites want to link to yours.

Second, Google has always taken the stance that a web master should inform Google about how their web sites should be read. This can be seen in the priority tag in the Sitemap standard, the addition of the nofollow tag, various commentaries about internal link structure, etc. Now Google is saying that webmasters should leave the analysis of query parameters that can be safely ignored up to an automated spider? In the cited article, the author states, "This is based on the presumption that search engines have issues with crawling and analyzing URLs that include session IDs or source trackers. However, as a matter of fact, we at Google have made some progress in both areas." Tell Google what, when Googlebot achieves sentience, I'll stop converting URLs. Not before. I want complete solutions, not "some progress" before I leave my URLs up for interpretation.

Finally, the author of the article makes the best argument in favor of the use of static URLs. "While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking." Oooh, my dynamic URL will rank higher than my competitor's static-looking link that will attract more clicks. Great. Of course, this is followed in the Q/A section with this piece of advice: "Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all? That's our recommendation"

/rant

[peginald]

I wonder if this is the telling quote:

"If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content."

Maybe they are looking for us to help them find out what is and is not dynamic content, and don't like the fact that they are unable to discover it when we hide it behind static URLs.

I can't think why it would help SEOs, however!

[spiderbait]

I have to admit that I was pretty shocked when I first started reading. But towards the end I came to some kind of breakthrough about their real objectives behind the article.

Boiled down, they simply don't want perishable parameters (or transient, non-important ones) showing up in seemingly static URLs.

The examples they gave included (where 98971298178906 is a session ID and URL is a referral source tracker):

example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3/98971298178906/URL
example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/language/en/answer/3/sid/98971298178906/query/URL

These seem like reasonable objectives, but the article overstates the case and attempts to fit everyone into a single set of recommendations just to avoid this one class of problems. It's the "mosquito with a sledgehammer" syndrome.

Anyway, I would never do such a thing as their examples indicated, so I've got nothing to worry about and will continue on my merry way.

[incrediblehelp]

I am no longer shocked anymore by this stuff. Google pours out self full-filling crap like this all of the time. It is the same concept as the paid links. They basically describe what "should" be done because it makes their life easier not anyone else.

DO IT BECAUSE IT HELPS GOOGLEBOT WORK BETTER

Should be their new motto. They give out these hints and pieces of info like they are suggestions in what to do right or wrong where in reality it is to help them form better results and crawl the web easier.

I just wish they were more straight forward.

[Big Juice]

Typical of Google to try to influence people into doing things their way and to hell with how it might affect any other search engine or system. Geez where have we seen that tactic before...

The whole nofollow thing was put together to help Google determine paid links and now the damn thing is everywhere. Rather than fix their own flawed ranking system they convinced everybody to use the thing for sponsored links or perhaps suffer the consequences of Google penalties. When not enough webmasters bought into it because they liked making a few bucks by selling links what does Google do - they hire a bunch of ranking raters to evaluate sites for their linking practices. It didn't matter if you were actually participating in paid linking or not; if some ranking rater thought that you were then that was all that mattered. Nice - real nice.

Now that more and more webmasters are using rewrites to convert their URLs into something a little easier for people to understand than a bunch of session IDs and operators, all of a sudden it is a bad thing so we have to once again modify our practices to suit the "will do no evil" search engine. Give me a break or better yet...

...why not just put together something definitive on the subject and lead by example instead of some hypocritical blog post that employs the very SEF URL structure that the post reported as being bad. Go to the post and look at the URL and tell me that isn't a search engine friendly URL that is devoid of session IDs and such.

People have to stop buying into the whole"Google is better" idea. The only thing that makes Google better is the "Mob Rules" mentality of using only Google. If Google were truly better would they need to hire private contractors to evaluate linking intent or get webmasters to apply the nofollow filter to their links regardless of intent? Think about it - links are the things that make the Internet work the way it does and Google wants to control how you use them. To my American friends - is this not a form of censorship?

Sorry for the rant but it pisses me off when Google refuses to give us the straight goods when it would be quite easy for them to do so.

[incrediblehelp]

Well said Big Juice.