What is URL Rewriting

18 Mar 2009

URL Rewriting is modifying a web URL's appearance. The classic reason to do this is changing a dynamic and cryptic URL into something that a human reader can understand. It is also a factor in improving the Search Engine Optimisation value of your content, but does Google disagree?

As an example of URL Rewriting, the following URL is most likely a link to a product that has a Product ID of AB10887 and is in Category GT66. Eh, whatever that means!? As a reader of the URL I have no real idea what it is linking to, so will I or won’t I click on it…?

http://www.mycompany.com/product.aspx?catid=GT66&pid=AB10887

It would be much more understandable (and clickable) if it was read as:

http://www.mycompany.com/MyProductName/

Although, in a lot of cases the parameters would need to be part of the URL, e.g.

http://www.mycompany.com/GT66/AB10887/MyProductName/

This is still much better than the original, particularly if “MyProductName” is exactly the product that you are looking for.

Apart from readability, the other use of URL Rewriting is for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) purposes, i.e. improving your sites ranking with Google, eh I mean with the search engines.

SEO consultants say that having your keywords in your URL will improve your visibility with the search engines, although Google seems to disagree. In an article on their official blog they recommend that you shouldn’t use rewriting at all as it may do more harm than good. When asked the question “Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?” Google replied with a definite “Yes”.

However, this article has caused a bit of a backlash from the SEO community (just read some of the comments on the article) and has also confused a lot of people. Their webmaster guidelines seem to contradict it:

“If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.”

This is an extract from http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

So where does that leave us? Should you rewrite or not? Well, personally I think you should rewrite URL’s if it is feasible to do so. Common sense tells me that a more readable URL is more likely to be clicked on than one that isn’t. On the SEO question, from reading around it does seem that SEO consultants do believe that it has a positive impact on rankings.

When I say "feasible to do so" you have to consider:

The cost