Silvery - 2:20 pm on Sep 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

How does Microsoft Live Search feel about rewritten URLs?

Well, I was at Web 2.0 Expo last week in New York where Nathan Buggia, Lead from Live Search's Webmaster Center, spoke on Advanced SEO for Developers. He stated outright that well-formed, static URLs with keywords can provide ranking benefit.

He said that endusers respond better to shorter URLs which contain keywords which reinforce the query that a user submits to a search engine. So, there's a definite usability/user-experience benefit to giving keyworded URLs some ranking weight.

Google's post mainly says "...don't rewrite your URLs because you might get it wrong... we want to know if a site is dynamic so we can treat those page URLs differently."

They do not mention how keywords in the URL may provide some ranking benefit -- which is sometimes harder to accomplish without some form of URL rewriting. As pageoneresults mentions above, this is somewhat counter to previous advice they've provided, even considering ongoing evolution of Google's ability to handle dynamic URLs successfully.