I thought this was one of the biggest cases of amnesia in Google’s short history. Just six years ago, I was at a SES conference and had a discussion with Matt Cutts involving long querystrings and Google’s ability to crawl dynamic content. Essentially, he recommended that I reduce the number of query sting variables to two or less. And he was correct.
When I took drastic measures to narrow down the query string variables on Apartmentguide.com (by using some crazy xml import based on local page variables) our indexed page count sky-rocketed. Within 2 months our rankings climbed to the top of SERPs and our traffic went from 60k/month to 500k/month. Within a year, our traffic rose to nearly 1 million/month.
Just last week, however, Google’s webmaster Blog made the following statements:
Myth: “Dynamic URLs cannot be crawled.”
Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters.
As well as:
Myth: “Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters.”
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic).
It may be true today that dynamic urls can be crawled when they are choc full of variables, but that has not always been the case. Calling it a “myth” is a little strange. Mod_Rewrite and Isapi Rewrite weren’t invented for nothing. And there definitely was a time when pages with long query string parameters were simply ignored by all search engines.
I think it is great that Google has overcome these obstacles to reading content. But because they made these gains does not make history a myth. Before you know it, they might claim that it is a myth that Google can’t read Flash content.
