Google and the URL Rewrites Controversy
Google never ceases to amaze the webmaster community. The newest controversy involving the most popular search engine started when the team at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted an article about dynamic URL rewrites:
One friend was concerned about using dynamic URLs, since (as she told us) “search engines can’t cope with these.” Another friend thought that dynamic URLs weren’t a problem at all for search engines and that these issues were a thing of the past. One even admitted that he never understood the fuss about dynamic URLs in comparison to static URLs. For us, that was the moment we decided to read up on the topic of dynamic and static URLs.
After several explanations on the subject, they drew these conclusions:
Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems.
(…) Although we are able to process this URL correctly, we would still discourage you from using this rewrite as it is hard to maintain and needs to be updated as soon as a new parameter is added to the original dynamic URL.
And this was when the problems began. Reactions among webmasters, SEOs, programmers and Internet marketers have been varied, but most of them can be summarised in the following points:
- Some people say there’s nothing wrong about Google team’s statements. For an experienced webmaster or programmer this whole URL rewriting matter can look irrelevant. But for a beginner it would be wiser not to play with URL rewrites indeed, because they could do something wrong, thus affecting their Google rankings.
- Others have gotten annoyed at that article. Some even seem to have taken offense at it. They claim that this time the Google team just put up a bunch of silly stuff and that Google underestimates webmasters. It’s been also implied that Google once again is trying to tell people how they are supposed to run their own businesses.
- Regardless of their views on this subject, everyone seems to agree that Google team’s article looks confusing and poorly-written.
What do you think? Will you stop using dynamic URL rewrites because Google said you probably won’t know how to deal with them?
