Does URL Rewriting Help or Hinder SEO?

A common tenet of modern Web development is to avoid long, obscure strings of characters in your URLs. So, for example, if your page’s URL looks like this…

http://www.mysite.com/view_product.xyz?id=ew44ds63f5hdvds98fdld2b

...it should really look like this instead:

http://www.mysite.com/products/kittylitter

The conversion of the former URL into the latter is known as “URL rewriting,” because it converts a long, ugly query string into a short, clean Web address. URL rewriting typically requires a special Web development framework or server module, but it has many advantages:

• URLs are shorter and easier to remember
• URLs are human-readable
• URLs do not expose the back-end web address to potential hackers

Until recently, rewritten URLs were also considered more search engine friendly. Google’s guidelines used to give this warning:

Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index

However, Google recently updated their guidelines and posted a blog entry to recommend not reformatting URLs:

One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It’s always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.

As other bloggers have pointed out, the irony here is Google’s own post on BlogSpot uses URL rewriting.

But the question remains: does URL rewriting help or hinder search engine optimization? I believe the benefits outweigh any potential drawbacks. Both static and dynamic URLs may be indexed just fine by Google’s bots, but ultimately it is humans who will decide whether or not to click on a link. Clear, friendly URLs are simply more likely to be clicked. If your Web development platform or content management system does not support friendly URLs, it still makes sense to find one that does.