The latest news from Google is sure to spark up a lot of discussion among Webmasters and professional SEO services. It’s about dynamic URLs. According to Google, it is not necessary to rewrite dynamic URLs in order to achieve optimized search results.
OK. The first thing you may be thinking is what the heck are dynamic URLs anyway and why should I care?
Let’s tackle the first question. Many Web sites these days have databases. Whether they’re commercial, academic, or personal, databases can be very useful for Web sites. They can also be very, very big and hard to update. Imagine how difficult it would be if a database with a couple thousand pages needed to be updated – weekly. That sounds like a lot of work, but with scripting languages like PHP, updating databases becomes a whole lot easier. PHP does all the hard work. But in certain situations, using PHP means creating a dynamic URL, which is a URL that’s created when a user makes a certain query. Those Web pages can be a hassle for professional SEO services looking to make every page as search optimized as possible.
Here’s how dynamic pages work: a user enters a query into a Web page. The script, PHP or a similar language does some quick binary wizardry and creates a unique (or dynamic) Web page modeled on whatever the user wanted. This is a page that will only exist as long as the user stays on the page. When the user closes the page, the URL is gone. Vanished. At least until someone else makes the exact same query.
So it’s easy to see why search engines and professional SEO services may have trouble with these dynamic URLs. Sometimes they exist for mere seconds, unlike their counterparts—static URLs—which stick around as long as the Web master wants to keep her Web page online.
Dynamic URLs are easy to spot. They often have long, nonsensical (at least to us) strings of letters and numbers. Most look like this:
http://thelittlestwebsite.com/products/itemid=2947&sort=date
Any professional SEO services specialist can tell you that if a page is difficult for you to figure out what’s going on, then a search engine will probably have just as much trouble. Here’s an example of an easy-to-understand static URL that makes life easier for Web users, professional SEO services, and search engines:
http://thelittlestwebsite.com/products/lunchpails.html
At least that was the conventional wisdom. Professional SEO services were able to make dynamic URLs look like static URLs. But changing them would often mean hours (and hours and hours) of work; not exactly the most enjoyable task for Webmasters or professional SEO services.
But there’s good news for Webmasters and professional SEO services. Google now claims that their Web crawler has grown sophisticated enough that it can read dynamic URLs almost as well it can read static URLs. Or in their own words: “While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of click-through rates because users can easily read the URLs, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking.”
But professional SEO services are a methodical bunch, and many won’t be convinced until they can test those dynamic URLs against static ones and carefully examine the results. But if those tests prove that Google is correct, that could mean less tedious work for Webmasters and professional SEO services, and more time for them to focus on more important, and more fun, Web site stuff.
