Google SEO: Should one use rewrites to change a dynamic URL to a static one?
In a blog posting dated September 22nd, (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html), Google is now promoting a dramatic departure from their prior guidance in that respect. What do you think?
Answers (15)
Google doesn't suggest you use one or the other. It simply suggests that if you use static or dynamic URL use them properly. Don't try to mask a dynamic URL to be static.
Hi Daniel
Several of us got into discussing this over at SEO Roundtable. What I find sad is that it's rare that someone who reads that particular blog post, seeing that it comes from Webmaster Central, and doesn't fully understand or take the time to digest what was posted, assumes this is a signal to throw out the process of converting dynamic URLs into human readable URLs.
A few of us at least have come to a different conclusion.
Here's the main points as I understand them:
Google's saying it's hard to convert them properly.
Well okay, if you are not or do not have access to a highly capable technical staff, then sure it's possible you could easily make conversion mistakes. Yet the engineers I work with or collaborate with are, in fact, very skilled. We do extensive testing during and after the process. both to ensure the conversion works right every time, and that the end result meets SEO best practices.
Because of this, I defer to even the Google position that "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."
So if you know what you are doing, (really know what you are doing), then why would you sacrifice that additional click-through rate that comes when someone does a search, sees two results one above the other, and on one, the URL is muck, the other it's intelligible and in fact contains keywords relevant to the search?
Juliane and Kaspar, the authors of that Google post, go to great lengths to put all sorts of bold warnings and cautions in it, implying it's dangerous and disadvantageous to do the conversion, and the tone really implies that the post is targeted at those who are not capable of properly converting.
Also, Google wants to be the "trusted source" that takes the responsibility of exploring and experimenting with your dynamic parameters, to see if their Bot can figure out what else it can find on your site. Yes - by intelligibly (by software) guessing at other parameters or variable results, the Bot apparently wants to be able to find other content to index.
Well excuse me, but isn't it my responsibility as an SEO professional, and the responsibility of the web designer, and the site owner, to collaboratively determine what content should be found / seen / navigable?
So from that perspective, thank you very much Google, but no thanks!
What the post does do well is help clarify that Google can make sense of dynamic URLs where that might not have been the case previously.
Except again, a well planned function of conversion, in the hands of a true SEO expert, actually opens up the optimization of the URL so that even more accurate keyword phrases are found, and hierarchical relationships of grouping of content can clearly be seen in the converted URLs. For example - a URL of whatever.com/?C=93&PID=a2993 does nothing to tell Google that c=93 is really Category 93 which might be Mens Shoes, and PID a2993 is the Brown Calfskin leather product. Yet whatever.com/catalog/Mens-Shoes/Brown-Calfskin-Leather/ works a heck of a lot better.
So then they argue that you can do better in the dymamic process, with a result of whatever.com/?catergory=Mens-shoes&product=Brown-Calfskin-Leather...
Well uh, at that point, why not just clean it up altogether and replace the ? and the & and the = symbols with / making it completely clean?
Actually even in the blog post, they hint that's a good thing to do - "If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL."
Okay so in a dynamic URL, the ?,&,= symbols are not unnecessary parameters, yet they are when trying to help a human comprehend the URL in the search results, and that's the bottom line here.
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Gideon R.
Non-executive Director at Always on Message
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Hi Daniel
SEOmoz ran an interesting post on the subject.
I think the money's still on rewriting...
Links:
Yes. On balance it increases visibility and therefore traffic. But, it can be quite a hard thing to retrofit.
As Google notes in their lede paragraph, they're denoting dynamic URLs via some conventional things such as parameters. They, and the SEOMoz blog entry mentioned in this thread, say that it's too easy to mistakenly copy and paste the wrong URL, and that the URLs contain lower keyword relevance, are messy in marketing campaigns and so on.
But all I believe this argument is null when using a framework such as Django or Ruby on Rails. The former is configured to produce beautiful URLs out of the box; URLs that don't suffer from the issues laid out by the Google article.
A good example is the URL for a blog entry I wrote a while back on how Django is good for SEO: http://patrickbeeson.com/blog/2008/jul/28/how-django-good-seo/
The title of the entry is clearly defined in the URL, as are the day, month and year in which it was published. Such, I could easily configure the URLs to contain a "static" signifier such as ".html" but why?
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i´ve some sites they have dinamic url that have any Page Rank nor good visibility on the SERPs. My experience tells that if you can use a modrewrite, don´t be afraid of the difficulty to implement it. It really works!
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Brent A.
Business Development at ShoWare by VisionOne
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either/or... SEO newest tool.
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keyword search: variable video
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Herman M.
Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing at Convergence Point Media, LLC
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Hi Daniel,
Well dynamic URLs aren’t the issue. We know Google can crawl them, as they are in their index. It’s the multiple parameters and dupe content and the fact the engine can get stuck in loops. I suggest to avoid multiple parameters and make short user friendly URLs. But if need be, use rewrites on dynamic URLs, but correctly.
It's interesting overall.. but really think about it people.. use common sense on this.. if you are using a simple CMS system like wordpress.. where the adoption rate is massive. (IE: everyone is using that platform) Google of course will put serious time and effort to making sure it's 100% spiderable.
If you are using some custom build CMS system with 25 variables in the url... a rewrite is the way to go.
If you are using some simple CMS (IE: Wordpress, Drupal) then you are fine without a rewrite.
and if you want the truth.. over the past year we have seen a moderate decrease in the ROI of building url rewrites with SIMPLE sites.. meaning that is slowly becoming less and less helpful in terms of ranking.
As I commented on the original Google post (as "Aaranged"), and as Herman rightly pointed out, the issue is not limited to crawlability, but also impacts the de facto generation of duplicate content.
Furthermore, as other replies to this and similar posts have indicated, there's a ton of empirical evidence that Google's indexing of dynamic URLs is anything but easy-breezy. If you work on a site that encodes even something as "easily" handled as session IDs, try poking around in the SERPs using the site: command and you'll as likely as not find session-encoded URLs.
And Alan's point is extremely well-taken. For an SEO professional, leaving possible URL indexing issues to chance is, well, unprofessional. It's analogous to a usability expert leaving the placement of web navigation elements for the user to figure out because users mostly end up finding things.
Finally, look at URL rewriting in the broader context of search engine optimization -- that is, Google is not the only search engine. Yes, this is a Google-specific post, but if rewriting URLs are likely to improve your performance in Google (even if it's only because of higher CTRs due to improved captions), then the same procedure is likely to improve a site's performance in the other engines too. Even if you believe Google's "we index 'em fine" claim, keep in mind that may not be the case for other engines. Interestingly, Yahoo's "snip these parameters" settings in Site Explorer doesn't exist in Google's Webmaster tools, so you have one engine doing dynamic URL cleanup algorithmically and another via a console. Again, if you do have the technical expertise available to you, why not simply skip the middle men (here the Google algorithm and the Yahoo web setting) and remove the possibility of any engine misinterpreting dynamic URLs altogether?
Hi Daniel,
I think it is pretty simple rather than try to get the 'right' answer. If you have to use a dynamic URL, limit parameters to 2-3 max. No issues there. And as already mentioned by Alan, cleaner URLs do help in click throughs. Using redirects is just not worth the effort. Hope it helps!
Jigar
For me it has been less about static vs dynamic and more about SE friendly URLs. In my latest experiences, I've found it to be one of the top 3-5 things you can do with onsite SEO to improve your rankings. I had our engineers spend over 2 weeks coding Green opolis .com with all SE friendly URLs and within a week it was evident in the amount of Google traffic.
I HIGHLY recommend it!
Please read Googl WebMasterTools ...
Nuff Said ...
Links:
Clarification added September 26, 2008:
From the big G ... "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few."
Daniel, as stated elsewhere, Google says you don't have to convert dynamic urls with a mod_rewrite. However, you must remember what search engines do - they look at a page and ask "what is this?" Good SEO makes it crystal clear through the url, the meta tags, the content, the H1 tags, incoming links, anchor text, etc. Google is not in the business of telling you how to rank high - you have to examine, test, and start over to know what's going on. And my experience, and those who I follow, suggest that Google does indeed look at the url for guidance.
Brendon S.
Freelance SEO Consultant
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Also, although this sounds an odd thing to say, bear in mind that Google types generally know very little about SEO. They are great at "big picture" stuff, but utter incompetents at detail (for which I am grateful, it makes them so easy to manipulate).
If you read the article carefully, what they are talking about is badly conceieved rewrite schemes, and referring to the fact that historically, dynamic URLs WERE a huge crawling problem for them. Tehy now have technical solutions for those technical problems, and want to avoid people screwing up perfectly good dynamic URL schemes by implementing bad rewrites.
If your SEO resource and your technical team are good enough t5o handle the job well, rewriting to static is ALWAYS superior. Just don't screw it up :)
