Mod-Rewrite? Is it worth it for dynamic pages?

[bpaynter]

Just read an article on a search engine newsletter advocating Mod-Rewrites: What are your thoughts on this? We have a dynamic site.. The interior pages are not getting scanned very often. Below is a small part of the article I copied and pasted:

"Perhaps you're familiar with that little bit of Apache server magic known as mod_rewrite. You may already know that it can take your ugly, unwieldy, dynamic URLs that look like:

http://yoursite.com/index.php?item=m...lue&size=large

...and turn them into static-looking URLs that are easier on the eyes:

http://yoursite.com/muumuu/blue/large

or even:

http://yoursite.com/m/b/l
Clearly, such rewritten URLs offer a more friendly appearance to real humans. They're more descriptive and they're easier to remember. What's more, they tend to be about 30% to 50% shorter than URLs containing database driven dynamic characters and, on a super-large site, you may even save a little bandwidth.

But the real question is:

Do rewritten URLs make a difference when it comes to getting your pages indexed and ranked higher in the search engines?

Well, the answer is, they do make a difference. In fact, rewritten URLs can make a big difference.

While it's true that Google has come a long way in parsing dynamic pages, just because the Google spider isn't choking on your dynamic URLs anymore doesn't mean it isn't avoiding indexing them, and it also doesn't mean it isn't still giving preference to static URLs."

Sounds like a lot of work...

Appreciate your input,

BJ