If you have been in the world of SEO you would probably have heard that search engines, all the prominent ones, prefer static URLs to dynamic URLs. Why and how? Before going to that let us start from what they are.
What is a static URL?
Static URL is one that doesn’t change. It won’t have any URL parameters and would be quite simple. These are the favorites of search engines. Updating such URLs are time consuming. This is so in the case of shopping websites and blogs that stores a lot of information and frequently needs to be updated. In the case of such websites, webmasters normally go for dynamic URLs.
What is a dynamic URL?
These URLs are created from searching a database-driven website. They are generated from specific queries to a website’s database. Here the date is changed in the database instead of in the HTML code. These URLs normally contain many variables and are difficult for the users to understand.
Why are static URLs preferred to dynamic URLs?
Search engines rank and index static URLs better than dynamic ones. Besides, static URLs are visibly more pleasing for the users as they are more simple and understandable. A brief glance through a static URL gives the reader an idea of what the page is all about. Whereas a dynamic URL contains variables and does not make much sense to a non-technical person. For this same reason users are more likely to click on static URLs that they understand than the dynamic ones.
Dynamic URLs take the last positions in search engines for another reason. That is, they normally do not have any keywords in them. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN give a lot of weight to URLs with their main keywords in included in the domain name. Google now has made some progress with ranking dynamic URL, but if the webmasters try to make the URL look static and hide the parameters, it makes crawling difficult. And this might have an adverse effect.
