URL rewriting has become quite popular, but I think it only adds more complexity to the Web. Old fashioned URL's are often called "dirty URLs", so I'll use that term.
It is argued that with rewriting it makes the URL more "discoverable" but how is it more discoverable with this URL
www.magic.com/date/2010/02/02
than this URL?
www.magic.com/date=2010-02-02
I believe people would discover more with the old fashioned URL than the rewrite URL.
With the good old fashioned URL, using ampersands and equal signs, you are actually telling the search engines how they relate to each other. With slashes you can't. They don't know that /2010/02/02
is actually a date or how the numbers relate to the /date/
. It merely assumes that it's a different directory with different data. With date=2010-02-02
I believe it'll allow search engines to figure out how they relate to each other.
Dirty URLs can easily be shortened with URL shortener services, but everyone copies a URL and pastes it; they don't write it. It's much simpler if they write down a dirty URL that's well laid out. A URL like goo.gl/8aPtuI
seems more cognitively difficult than generic.com/awesome
.
I read an argument that search engines stop at URLs that look dynamically generated, but I am skeptical. Virtually all websites are dynamically created, so why would they stop there?
I'd also think that dirty URL's can be meta-rich if you do it right.
www.generic.com/rate=5&name=Allen&sex=m
and it's much easier for engines to see how they are related than doing this,
www.generic/com/rate/5/name/Allen/sex/m.
What are the real advantages?