Update to our webmaster guidelines

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

As the web continues to change and evolve, our algorithms change right along with it. Recently, as
a result of one of those algorithmic changes, we’ve modified our
webmaster guidelines. Previously, these stated:
Don’t use “id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.

However, we’ve recently removed that technical guideline, and now index URLs that contain that
parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don’t worry about
rewriting it—we’ll accept it just fine as is. Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with
a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so
rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is
available to you. If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more
likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls.