Google and Mod rewrites

I am designing a site. If I get a MOD rewrite done is this better for serps?

 

it depends on what your URLs look like

if your site URLs look like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/27327734/sec83493.html

then that tells the serps and/or visitors nothing about your page content,
so you would use Mod REwrite to rewrite the url to

http://www.yoursite.com/products/something-descriptive.html

its not as easy as that in practice and it depends if URL generation is dynamic or not. if it is then you will need to rent a coder to ahck about your site code to generate nice urls.

 

mod rewrite helps to get more pages indexed and so more traffic.
if u have a forum like phpbb or vb, mods are available which easily handle mod rewrite and give u(and google) gr8 looking urls.

 

What about an ecommerce site?
I am selling cars for e.g.
Will the oages display above normal pages?

 

Mod_rewrite is being used for 2 reasons:
1. It can shorten the dynamic URLs, making them shorter and better looking
2. It can virtually display the places for some parameters and replace some of them.

If both #1 and #2 are done correctly, it will give you an extra small boost in SERPs. But don't expect to be #1 just because you're using mod_rewrite.

 

The boost mod_rewrite provides only really applies if you do it well ,nice, relevant URLs , and even then it's not a huge boost, but ever little helps, especially if you are trying to hit the top. It's also important to have an Apache based server if you want to use mod_rewrite, just as a sidenote.

 

And isn't that what I said earlier?

 

Ah, sorry. I forgot to add the last bit
Mod_Rewrite can actually damage your rankings if you do it wrong, and if you set them, make sure you are happy with it, because if you edit the structure, that's your rankings gone. It's great when you get it right, but if you decide in the future that it'd look better another way, as I have, then your rankings just vanish :O
Philopoemen - Apologies, I didn't mean to copy you
Edit - ugh, that was common sense too,, forgotten what I meant to write

 

Looks like it helps a lot, especially when your keywords are on your URL...

 

It's good to use it to help make url's more readable.

 

That's ok

And I do have a 5k pages site where I changed the rewritten structure a bit... I just had to keep a lot of redirects for the first month after changing the structure, but once google updated the old link structure - i removed the old redirects and everything is fine. Kept a lot of PR 2-3 pages