There has been much talk this week over Google’s official blog post regarding URL rewriting. Some think it’s a game changer, and some don’t. Essentially, Google recommends that you shouldn’t attempt to make dynamic URLs look static because A. Google can crawl those URLs anyway, B. some of the information passed in those URLs can help Google understand the content better and C. apparently, people screw up URL rewriting and then Google doesn’t see any of the information (a symptom of which I would believe yields much greater problems than Google not seeing your content-namely that your site wouldn’t be functioning).

URLs wear serve many different purposes. They are a branding tool (for better or worse), they are instructions for how a page should be rendered, they give people something to bookmark and the list goes on. When one ‘rewrites’ a URL, they may be doing so for a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is to shorten them and make them easier to read (and thus, more likely to be clicked on, remembered from a print ad and so on). We KNOW Google recognizes words in URLs, and there are even operators to search for them there.

Even if the words in a URL aren’t factored into how a page is assigned a rank for a given search result, we certainly can draw attention to a URL if it has a word in it that matches a query. One would think from the SEO perspective, that we are leaving money on the table if we aren’t capitalizing on that opportunity.