Do you have to use URL rewriting now to rank?

[internetheaven]

Over a year and one of my sites has had a terrible time ranking. It seems that each month, Google picks a handful of pages and ranks them superbly. Then, next month that handful is shuffled and they rank great ... and so on and so on ...

Have read some stuff on google's webmaster site which seems to indicate that if you use:

/folder/page.php?show=129
/folder/page.php?show=908
/folder/page.php?show=93
/folder/page.php?show=89304&next=2

as your site URls then they will consider most of the pages within /folder/ as being much the same and only return a handful as being relevant in SERPS. My site is database driven and I thought the only value to mod_writing the entry number to a word was that keywords in the URl have some value. As my products are niche I wasn't expecting to have to have a "ranking fight" with anyone anyway so all these little things seemed unimportant. Do I now have to mod_rewrite and 301 redirect my entire site to things like:

/folder/product_45/
/folder/about_us/
/folder/terms_conditions/
/folder/privacy/
/folder/product_category_1/page_2/

just to rank every page rather than just a few from my site each month?

Thanks
Mike

[tedster]

Even though rewriting your urls can give a small boost, I don't think it's going to fix this issue you described, where a different small group of pages rank well at different times. It would probably be worth the experiment to do the rewrite, but Google is doing better with query string urls as time goes on, not worse.

Most peculiar - it sounds something like some other observations we've seen here in recent weeks - webmasters who feel they are seeing traffic thresholds or traffic throttling from Google search.

[Asia_Expat]

I speak from the experience of running a well optimised IPB forum installation...
IMHO, from what I have observed with my competitors, other IPB forums, my own experimentation... I think the effort required to rewrite all of my URL's is not worth the gain. Many of my forum threads rank very well indeed, and they all have standard dynamic URLs.

... my $0.02