sam222 - 10:00 am on Dec 28, 2012 (gmt 0)

By diberry

In their Webmaster Guidelines, Google actually specifies that you should make your URLs just a string of relevant words

I believe relevant words string means a string of keywords. Would it not be keywords stuffing which Google penalizes? Please explain bit more.

the biggest benefit I found is exactly what deadsea said - minimising endless duplicate pages created because of inconsistant use of parameters

You should make sure the words are checked and such incorrect URL requests either return 404 or redirect to the correct URL

which means URL rewriting has no siginficant effect on SEO by anyway and only helps to control URLs duplication?