Google says don’t use pretty permalinks!
We all love our WordPress pretty permalinks, don’t we? Aside from making our blog post links a lot more readable for other people, we’ve always believed Google favored them over the obscure dynamically generated URLs. Well Google has set the record straight in a recent entry at their Webmaster Blog.
While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.
Here are Google’s recommendations:
- Avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static
- Keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic)
Does that mean we shouldn’t be taking advantage of WordPress’ built-in URL rewriting system just to avoid penalties in the search engine optmization department? I’ll take readability over PageRank anyday, thank you very much.
