Google confuses: dynamic URLs now better?

Google is responsible for some racket in the SEO-scene last week thanks to a posting on dynamic and static URLs. Now that the fog around this has lifted a bit, I want to (finally) provide my assessment.

Google has a massive problem with the fact that many dynamic URLs are wrongly (!) rewritten into static versions. One nice example for this is provided by Jenoptic as well as other sites who use the widespread CMS “RedDot”:


None of the highlighted portion seems to be transporting any information and the integration of the session-ID in the URL will make the Googlecrawler index the page anew every time he is assigned a new session, as a consequence. A nice example for this can also be seen with the Jenoptik.com-homepage, which is indexed through at least three different URLs.


This is the background on which you have to read the Google-posting: before developers, who are clueless on this matter, try to tweak the URLs they should rather leave it be and give Google a chance to delete unnecessary parameters from the URLs. I can not agree with the following recommendation to completely stay away from static URLs on account of this. I believe that diligent and cleanly structured static URLs have a number of advantages:

For one, restrictively formulated rewrite-instructions forces a “URL-hygiene” on you which is easily forgotten for dynamic URLs. In the following example I was able to get the page with the parameters a=1, b=2 and c=3 into the Googleindex three times, just by switching around the order of parameters:


While this would be impossible in a properly constructed static URL, there is nearly no site who checks the correct order of URL-parameters and redirects them by 301-redirect to the correct order where necessary.

On the other hand I do believe that logically constructed URLs should have no problem dealing with changes in the “substructure”, meaning the CMS – this would enable the URLs of a website to stay the same throughout generations of CMS-changes, only the internal rewrite-rules would need adjustment.