We’ll continue to use properly implemented redirect strategies, where appropriate, as a part of a total search marketing campaign. In competitive verticals a website that correctly rewrites dynamic URLs to short, keyword rich static URLs will outperform those who don’t (ceteris paribus).

The Webmaster Central Blog isn’t written just for those of us who dabble in search engine optimization. That’s why they have Matt Cutts. The Webmaster blog is for….webmasters. That means every webmaster from Fortune 500 companies with a million pages and full ecommerce, all the way down to your local flower shop with 5 pages and just a phone number. You can imagine that the Fortune 500 webmaster likely has a team of engineers and designers to help them out, while the flower shop is lucky to have a website at all. So when Juliane and Kaspar wrote their wee post, they’re trying to be helpful.

The line most people are concerned about says: “avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static”. (Bold and italics are original) Why is this? They give four key points about dynamic URLs that I’ll paraphrase:

1. Rewrites are hard
2. It’s ‘safer’ to let Google handle it
3. If you rewrite, remove the junk
4. If you rewrite for a static URL make a static copy of the content.

I could go on and on about the issues with this post (as has been done on Sphinn and Webmaster World) but the same fundamentals we’ve always shared with our clients still apply. They touch on them in the post:

Keep your URLs short: Short URLs with relevant keywords perform better in the search results. They rank better, and the get better click-through.

Rewrites are hard: Rewriting can be very tricky, depending on your CMS. If it’s a complicated CMS and we’re looking at lots of pages, you’ll get to know your engineers very well.

Help us analyze your URL structure: Keeping your folder structure shallow, but presenting it, as well as the entire architecture of your site, in a logical format will help you perform well in the search results.

Google’s John Mueller replied to a comment which helps separate the wheat from the chaff.

We see too many examples of webmasters shooting themselves in the foot by installing some so-called "SEF/SEO-Module" on their site, which makes algorithmically understanding a website close to impossible. If we are to give a general recommendation, we would have to say that it is better to stick with dynamic URLs.

What he’s saying is if you’re not sure of what you’re doing, let Google handle it. They’ve got to make their recommendations relevant to the flower shops of the world, and those sites which are very technically savvy (or are working with Enquiro).

I agree that the authors are being a little Google-centric in their post, and I’d like to hear what they think about dynamic URLs will work in some of the other engines. Yahoo has actually offered to help rewrite your URLs.

For the rest of us, it’s business as usual.


Copyright 2008 - Enquiro Search Solutions.