Rewriting the URLs
Whether we call it rewriting the URLs or changing the permalink structure, it is a common practice to use “nice” URLs on dynamic content websites, instead of the default ones. For example, this post has the URL http://tastekid.com/blog/?p=75, and if I was rewriting the URLs it would have probably looked like this: “http://tastekid.com/blog/2008/10/rewriting-the-urls”.
Nowadays, noble arguments are used in favor of rewriting the URLs, like “improving the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links” [Wordpress]. But let’s face it, these weren’t the most important arguments back when this whole practice begun. Instead, this was (and still is) one of the basic SEO techniques used in order to improve the SERP performances of web pages.
It is a known fact that one of the measures used by search engines when evaluating a page is the URL relevancy. For example, “http://example.com/how-to-rewrite-urls.html” will be seen as more relevant than “http://example.com/?articleID=2435″, for a search performed on “how to rewrite URLs”, given the same article content, page title, inbound links etc.
Besides the lack of relevancy, there was (and still is, to a certain point) a belief that search engines have something against dynamic URLs, that is, URLs that are using GET variables (e.g.: “?x=1&y=2″).
A long time ago, a large part of the web was consisted of static pages. That meant that if the URL of a page was “http://www.example.com/how-to-rewrite-urls.html”, a real physical HTML file called “how-to-rewrite-urls.html” presumably existed on the disk in the root of the example.com domain. The idea was that these static pages where considered to be more relevant than dynamic pages, that can be artificially generated in large numbers and don’t necessary contain relevant information. This idea is obviously obsolete now, and I am sure that for some time now search engines don’t even bother to consider that a “nice” URL may address a real physical file.
I don’t think that today search engines have anything against dynamic URLs. The only (but important) factor that contributes to the SERP performances is the URL relevancy. To explain my point of view by giving an example, I do think that “http://example.com/how-to-rewrite-urls.html” will perform better than “http://example.com/?articleID=2435″, but I don’t think it is considered any better by search engines than “http://example.com/?q=how-to-rewrite-urls”.
Rewriting the URLs is a good practice in most cases. Besides improving SERP performances, it also provides a sort of teaser for the page in the URL (if you give the URL to a friend through a messaging system, he or she will have an idea what it is about). Rewriting the URLs for this blog would be a good idea. For TasteKid though, I have decided not to do it. One of the reasons is that I consider a link like http://www.tastekid.com/ask?q=Radiohead to be sufficiently relevant. Another reason is a sort of statement against rewriting the URLs when it is not necessary, and proving that search engines don’t have preconceptions with dynamic URLs (Google has indexed most of Taste Kid’s pages). Also, rewriting the URLs comes with a (small but greater than 0) processing overhead, and for a search discovery engine, I think classic dynamic URLs are more appropriate.
