For years, for the purposes of SEO, webmasters have had to compensate for the search engines' inability to index dynamic (database driven) web sites. Most large websites, such as online shops and blogs, serve up content based on queries on their database using dynamic URLs. Many such sites have had to implement mod rewrites on the URLs to overcome the problems.

Apparently, according to Google, the rewriting of dynamic URLs into static URLs could soon become a thing of the past, with them advising webmasters to avoid reformatting dynamic URLs to make them look static. A recent post on Google's Webmaster Central Blog dispelled the myth that dynamic URLs cannot be crawled.

Google suggested it may have had difficulty handling dynamic URLs in the past, but said it had made progress in the areas of analysing URL parameters and ranking of dynamic content.

Interestingly, and a lot more worrying, Google warned webmasters that if they tried to make their URLs look static, they could be giving the Googlebot problems and thereby doing more harm than good.

The warning from Google isn't exactly helpful, since the "work around" on Google's inefficiencies has been in place on many sites and for a long time. Does this mean mod rewriting has to be taken down to rank in the future? Like always the best policy will be to continue until a problem occurs - then fix the problem.

Matt Paines