I just came across two recent discussions about clean URIs – one from the Google Webmaster Central blog titled Dynamic URIs vs. static URLs; and the other from a Nathan Buggia of Miscoroft titled Advaned SEO for Web Developers. Both are in the context of SEO.
In a way, these two are making opposing suggestions. Google says
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.
Apparently, this post annoyed a number of SEOs that make money by selling URL-rewriting (or even proxying) as part of optimizing sites for search engine ranking.
On the other hand, MSFT says, no, rewrite your URIs such that the indexer can pick up keywords from URIs. It in fact suggests using "-" separated words in path segments of URIs, like the one used for this blog post. See slide 26 of the deck on Advaned SEO for Web Developers. I can see that URI readability may be important for users of search results, but I am surprised that Live Search tries to extract meaning from URIs. Interesting Friday read!
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I had a feeling human readable and easy to remember URLs had a branding effect and an SEO effect too… Good to get a hint that there are some tools which could this URL re-writing. Interesting stuff to investigate further upon…