"Avoid Reformatting a Dynamic URL to Make It Look Static"

...One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. Its always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.

Google also says, If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content. On the question Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?, Google says, Thats our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems.

Well, Ill continue to make sites for users first and not search engines, and to me a URL like example.com/product/123/ looks more readable than example.com/product.py?id=123, so Ill ignore Googles recommendation and continue to use htaccess rewriting for those URLs where I find it makes sense, e.g. most pages which arent the result of a form submission (if this was what Googles advice was about, Im not perfectly sure). More than that, I think that URLs should be permanent where possible, so back-end decisions about whether a page is static/ cached or dynamically served via a database should not influence URL (interface) decisions... after all, the back-end may change over time.

Perhaps what Google might have intended to attack really are just over-eager search engine optimizing methods that rewrite half a dozen parameters to static URLs being afraid that Google might otherwise not index them, but by doing so causing URL structures with duplicate content (Google gives the example of using a session ID within such a URL). Or perhaps things like sites rewriting search results to bot-accessible, static-looking URLs, causing noise. If thats the case, other parts of their message seem to risk add more confusion, though.

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