sonjay - 12:26 pm on Sep 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

The blog post is both confused and confusing. If Google wants to make the claim that they can now handle dynamic URLs as well as they handle static URLs, that's fine. It may or may not be true, but they're free to make the claim. But telling us that we now should avoid rewriting URLs, just because they think they have the dynamic URL issues licked, is disingenuous.

Google put a lot of shoulds into that post, without giving any solid reasons (other than "it's hard to do").

I use rewritten URLs primarily because they're shorter and more user-friendly:
example.com/clothing/mens/ties vs.
example.com?product_cat=clothing&sub_cat=mens&sub_sub_sub_cat=ties

Every day I see people's eyes glaze over and their brain cells turn to mush when they try to decipher all those & and = parameters.

I will continue to use rewrites to create static-looking URLs for my users. I thought Google's point all along was to create sites for users. Now they're telling us what we should and shouldn't do for GoogleBot regardless of whether it's better or worse for our users.

The blog post also ignores the existence of other search engines. Even if Google truly does handle dynamic URLs just fine, other search engines do exist, and static URLs may perform better with other SEs.

Sorry, this doesn't pass the smell test.