[Admin]

Are you wondering what's brandonsbaseballcards.com it's Brandons Baseball Cards website of course... however it's a fictional site created by Google to illustrate their Search Engine Optimization guide released yesterday.

Over on the official Google Blog they released this Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide to give people an understanding of how to help their sites rank.

So BrandonsBaseballCards.com is the site they cited in the document, if you visit the domain it redirects to Google's homepage.

The guide they released is fairly basic, however if you are new to websites and interested in doing things right in order to get extra traffic then it may be worth reading.

Google have though contradicted themselves a great deal:

From the Search Engine Optimization PDF

Improve the structure of your URLs

URLs like these can be confusing and unfriendly. Users would have a hard time reciting the URL from memory or creating a link to it. Also, users may believe that a portion of the URL is unnecessary, especially if the URL shows many unrecognizable parameters. They might leave off a part, breaking the link.

The words in the URL might appeal to a search user more than an ID number like "www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/article/102125/" would.

Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL
contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the
page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.

Good practices for URL structure
• Use words in URLs - URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure
are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be
more willing to link to them.

Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they're quite complex, but spending the
time to make your URLs as simple as possible for both users and search engines can help.

From Webmaster Central Blog 22nd Sep 2008

Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.

One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static.

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?

That's our recommendation

Although we are able to process this URL correctly, we would still discourage you from using this rewrite as it is hard to maintain and needs to be updated as soon as a new parameter is added to the original dynamic URL

So, they discourage it one minute claiming it is an "advanced and complex" process to do right then turn around and recommend it just weeks later in a newbie SEO Guide.

*Shrugs*