On Monday a post appeared on Google’s Webmaster Central blog that was so gobsmackingly strange I’ve had to let it sit for a few days to make sure my post-weekend reduced cognitive function wasn’t the reason I didn’t get it. I’m talking about Juliane Stiller and Kaspar Szymanski’s points on dynamic URLs vs. static URLs.

The post outlines a bunch of reasons why website creators shouldn’t create static versions of dynamic URLS (i.e. changing site.com/product.asp?id=99&brand=1 to site.com/sony/walkman). Among the reasons not to use static URLs they listed the following:

• They’re hard to create
• They’re hard to maintain
• It’s better to let Google guess which parameters are important
• If you want a static URL you should create a static equivalent of your content

The hard to create and maintain part might be true of some webmasters but I think the majority would greet that statement with a hearty “What the?!”. Most developers will have at least one tool in their box for URL rewriting, typically mod_rewrite when developing on a LAMP stack, though ASP has ISAPI_Rewrite and just about any web scripting language you care to name has functionality to write static (or semi-static) files to the file system. Static seeming URLs have been recognised as best practice for years, it’s not like this is bleeding edge technology developers are just getting to grips with.

As for letting Google guess which parameters are most important, I don’t even know where to begin with that. Does the Google Search Quality team really think they know my site better than I do? They’re good, but until they plant that neural chip Sergey is no doubt working on and start indexing the content of my brain that’s just not going to happen.

As for creating a “static equivalent of your content”, isn’t “static equivalent” just another way of saying “duplicate content”?

If that wasn’t enough reason to be scratching your head at the article there’s also plenty of factors they don’t mention which make excellent reasons for using static-seeming URLs:

• Improved rankings. Even if Search Engines drop URLs as a ranking factor it’s still going to help having a URL that’s keyword rich
• Security. I’m no fan of security through obscurity but given the choice to obfuscate or not I’ll do it, all other things being equal
• Convenience. Static URLs tend to be easier to pass around over IM or email.
• Portability. If I decide to change my scripting platform from ASP to PHP (or whatever) and don’t have full access to the web server I have to change all my URLs. Not if they’re static.

And the #1 reason we, and everyone else, should ignore this advice from Google:

• Usability. The URL is often the first thing a visitor knows about the page and they appreciate the early clue as to it’s content. Static URLs engender more user trust and goodwill than dynamic. People just like them. So if you like people, go static.

Oh, and the URL the post appeared on? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html.

Bizzare.

you work it out.

Pre 9AM

I pull up in the car park at the same time. I know from speaking to Dave late last night that he has been focusing on the blog. Must have been a late one ..

9AM

Somewhat of a shadow hangs over the Bronco building as Dave considers exactly what to do about the blog. This isn’t just some attention seeking effort on his behalf, It’s more about the realities of how others can affect a blog without your knowledge. It leaves a bitter taste.I think of just how many other blogs that are out there and susceptible to exploits. Dave doesn’t want a Google baby sitter, time for a fresh start perhaps ?

10AM

Dave and Becky are sorting out flights for SES Chicago 2008  8-12th December. Some pretty good deals on flights considering rising fuel costs etc. I check out some client sites and get a few surprises in terms of content.  The other Dan is doing a preliminary check on SEO for another site.

 12AM

Dave is back on form he’s on the phone, talking to a client about effective calls to action. In amongst this he is profiling their site for usability.

3PM

Dave talking about in-house development tools and their functionality. He reminds us that the web is a huge place with so many opportunities out there. Dave is definately in creative mode, whilst still thinking back to the issue with this blog.

4.30PM

Its been a long week and Dave is talking to one of our web design team.

5.00PM

Dave at last gets away early to his wife and kids…what a week…

It looks like 20 million savers are likely to be affected by the takeover by Lloyds of HBoS ( Halifax and Bank of Scotland ).

But what does it really mean to you and is your money safe? Who is likely to be affected ?

Well if you have less than £35,000 you will be fine HBOS is a monster bank, but if you have more than £35,000 you need to know that :

HBoS subsidiaries,
Halifax
Birmingham Midshires building societies,
Bank of Scotland,
Intelligent Finance

but what if you have savings in

Sainsbury’s
the AA
Saga.

If the sum of your wealth is great than £35,000 in the above companies you might want to spread it around a little, but should you be standing outside any of the HBoS branches, I don’t think think they are really really top big to fail, but then again I’m a Leeds United fan and I said we were too big a club to go down, if any one see Ken Bates opening a Hbos account let me know…

DaveN

update : On why davidnaylor.co.uk is under a large penalty in Google. Today I was in a meeting in Lancaster so I had 1 hour in the office first thing and I felt that it must be Outbound links that I was getting hit down with, so I removed adsense and my recent comments widget. I also removed my sidebar ad’s, cleaned out a few comments that had used a post and switch method,

I then checked my rankings in Google, noticed I had dropped more pages. Checked a few headlines from the blog in the serps and found the scrapers ranking and my blog nowhere, so I wrote this post and decided that the blog was fucked on this domain name and I wasn’t going to waste any more time trying to save it.

I wasn’t even sure if it was the scrapers that had killed me so that was the decision to move onto a new domain. While I was in the meeting Becky texted me to say they had found something Patrick at Blogstorm ( I’m not linking out just in case I pass bad karma) and Josh from JaeWeb , had spotted an issue. It was spot on, the server had been comprised and the site was cloaking links to google of antidepressant drugs and we had a fake adsense code injected into the blog.

This is what looks likely why I got banned for now, but I’m not a normal webmaster I have pretty good relations with Google and this blog is registered with webmaster tools, but I never got one message about this issue even though I couldn’t see the links (I don’t have a google IP address) I still picked up a penalty. I even sent emails to google and they never said hey remove the spam links on your blog.

Don’t get me wrong I’m blaming myself here, I added the plugin that opened my xmlrpc to a bad guys, I feel let down by Google due to fact they have a message system to reach out the webmasters and this system obviously failed, whether I didn’t meet the correct criteria on davidnaylor.co.uk (I get plenty of help on sites that send lots of traffic to adsense ) maybe it’s the industry I’m in,

But what happens from here I don’t know, I never said I was stopping blogging I’m a SEO, I work in the search engine industry and having your site dead in the biggest search engine to me just doesn’t sit right.

whatever happens If I keep on blogging on Davidnaylor.co.uk I will just 404 this page, so that the people that think this is just linkbait can feel a little better about themselves :) Thankyou Donna for sphinning this Post and sorry that your getting shit over that.

DaveN

____________________________________________

It kills me to see my content been scraped and people making adsense revenues off it all over the web, we have tried everything what we can think to get the blog reindexing again and it’s just not happening, I love Blogging never thought I would say that but I do,

To all the bloggers out there first off I’m sorry about the blog spamming that may or may not have happened a few years ago, But I guess what goes around comes around..

I not giving up on Blogging and I will let people know in due course what I going to do, I once said if your out of Google your out of the internet and I feel that i have spent enough time going though my Logs and wasting my tech guys time trying to find a solution .. so Google you won this battle. but the war is not over yet

Any ideas for a new url for the David Naylor blog comments away :) keep it clean !! or any Ideas at all what we should do 9 days out of Google I said I would give it 2 weekS

DaveN