Static Versus Dynamic Urls, Which Is Better? Static.
by Adelard Gasana
There is a lot of back and forth about the topic of static versus dynamic URLs and it’s implication to search engine optimization. Early on, Google told us to use URL rewrites whenever possible, and now they are saying you don’t have to do any rewrites.
Here is the most recent article concerning rewrites.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html
As of Sept 2008, Google encourages no rewrites, but you have to look at the reason. They state that you should remove unnecessary parameters that might cause problems if you do a rewrite. The reason for this is there is session IDs in a lot of PHP, and other programming that is stored in the URL to track users. They recommend that if you do a rewrite, you should remove the session ID to not create duplicate content on your site.
In my web design, all of this is irrelevant since I never use parameters in the URLs when doing organic search engine marketing. The only time I would use variables or parameters in the URL is when I am doing a PPC campaign, and tracking information with my own software. Otherwise I always advise having your web site URLs end in the extension only, example, index.html, index.html, index.shtml, index.php, or simply www.yourdomain.com/example/.
Here are some reasons I do this:
1. It looks cleaner. index.php?variable=123&sessionID=gj0a9gq&language=en does not look clean.
2. When your visitor bookmarks a URL with a session ID and later goes back to it, it might come back as an invalid session ID. This can appear unprofessional. You can possibly lose returning visitors due to the fact that your site is not friendly enough to bookmark.
3. Forget about Google for a second. It’s great that they can figure out how to determine what parameters are necessary, and have been rewarded as being the #1 search engine for it. They know their stuff, but that does not mean that I should ignore the other search engines; they get traffic as well.
What about the niche search engines? Without the research, development, and programmers of major search engines, they sometimes need URL rewrites to index a site. Dynamic URLs might hinder them as will URL rewrites if it includes parameters like session ID, which change every time one visits a site.
4. As a web designer I feel more comfortable linking to a page that is static, or has a URL rewrite than a dynamic-looking one, with a bunch of parameters at the end. It feels more comfortable since I know that this page will be available to my web visitors.
What I suggest is not to get into the habit of putting parameters in the URL at all. Do all your coding and tracking professionally with server side code, and have your URLs look as clean as possible. I simply avoid the whole static versus dynamic situation altogether by making all my pages static. Currently for all my websites I use a.shtml server side for my sites. This allows me to run CGI scripts right on the page. I can also run content from another page, like a footer.shtml page to all the pages that allow me to edit when making changes. All my sites are technically dynamic since they are “processed” and “sewed” together when they are requested. They all look static. PHP has the exact same ability; I prefer perl since I learned that language before PHP came into existence.
There was a comment on that Google page if permalink from WordPress is useless. I suggest continuing using permalink and keeping your URLs clean looking. In my opinion, a site with static URLs, or at least static looking URLs, tend to be more trustworthy. I know I can come back to them later and 95% of the time the page is not going to be moved, missing, or going rogue.
When it comes down to a decision like taking the advice of Google, or a particular source about getting traffic, I always ask myself, will it hinder my ability to get traffic from another source? Me listening to Google in this case, not just might, but WILL severely limit my ability to get traffic from niche search engines and other major search engines that aren’t as advanced as Google.
From what I see, Google is looking at only their benefit, if everyone stops rewriting URLs; they become the one search engine that can read everything thus becoming more dominant. When putting out the advice they didn’t consider cross website linking problems that might occur with URLs that have session ID in them.
It’s great that they can figure it out, but when my visitor’s web browser spit out a “This session ID is invalid” since the website I am linking to didn’t do a URL rewrite or they are not static pages, that’s when I have to step back and not listen to their advice.
Tags: Google Standards, Search Engine Marketing, Static URLs, Web Standards
