How much truth is there to the saying "search engines can't crawl dynamic urls"? I've got sites with a lot of dynamic pages and all pages seem to be indexed by Google. I'm putting some extra effort into working on my SEO and am exploring all avenues. Would it be worth my time to look at URL re-writing options even if google, yahoo, live and msn seem to be finding my pages OK?
Google and other major search engines index dynamic URLs just fine, as long as they are constant and don't change. However, you can add more value\strength to keywords by using search engine friendly urls.
Hey, SE can definitely index dynamic URLs. URL Rewriting is really worth the effort when it comes to SEO. That allows to get keywords in the page name and title instead of something like page?id=123
Would it be better to rewrite urls with the keywords seperated with underscores ( _), hiphens ( - ) or whatever? example: the url I have is http://www.mysite.com/products/product.asp?id=1 should I rewrite it as: http://www.mysite.com/products/the_red_widget or http://www.mysite.com/products/the-red-widget or http://www.mysite.com/products/the+red+widget or http://www.mysite.com/products/the red widget
I can attest to the strengths of doing the rewrite. My site had pages indexed in the search engines, but when I did the rewrite to include product names in the urls, it helped out so much more and even increased my serps a bunch. My site has been around for over 2 years and this was a jump that I was looking for. I would recommend it. I would also go with the "-" for spaces. Good luck.
Who said search engine can't crawl dynamic urls? I'm not agree with that point. just concentrate to gain your quality back link and make your url search engine friendly.
When the Goggle yahoo and MSN started their sitemap Tool. Now they have no problem in crawling dynamic URL'S
As ssandecki said, it's absolutely true, and yes (respectively). It'll also greatly improve the usability of the site as well, from a person's standpoint. The easier it is to use the site, the better. In fact, the Usability Mantra just happens to be "Don't Make Me Think" for a reason. Dashes and underscores are practically equal these days. However, I recommend that you go with the dash because it's not only easier to read than the others, but some people may become confused with the underscore, thinking that it's a blank space - which will result in a lot of broken links (and a needlessly cluttered server log full of 404 "File Not Found" errors). Several years ago (around 2001, to be exact), search engines had a lot of trouble crawling and indexing pages with dynamic URLs. This problem has all but been fixed since then - the only issues with dynamic URLs these days tend to be limited to session IDs and the like.