Do friendly URLs affect Google indexing / performance?

[CurtisS]

I've been noticing that other sites in our space seem to use "friendly" URL's that have the category and region in human readable (and search engine readable) form. Our links are much more cryptic e.g. http://www.example.com/?pubid=TOP-2314&sradius=25&headingid=10086&subheadingid=1&startpos=1
Although the google bot has constantly indexed these links I'm suspecting that it may do a better job if we convert. Thoughts?
Thanks

[edited by: jatar_k at 2:47 pm (utc) on April 20, 2008]
[edit reason] please use example.com [/edit]

[tedster]

Friendly urls can attract clicks more easily, and having (a reasonable number) of keywords in the filepath helps a little bit with ranking - it is one of the many signals that Google watches.

[Juvie]

Keywords in the file path definitely have affected rankings for us. We are now ranking well for "homegirls keyword" and "homeboys keyword," because we haven't been able to get the category label "home" out of our URLs. Ha ha!

[edited by: tedster at 11:59 pm (utc) on April 20, 2008]