[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by Mike54

Whoa, not so fast. I'm familiar with your position on rewriting URL's, but here is Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide that doesn't support your views. Check in around the bottom of page 6 and read on.

"Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines."

Interesting sentence, eh? And please note this particular Google document was released after the one you've linked. And rather than recommending against rewriting URL's, they are clearly stating it "could lead to better crawling of your documents".

Perhaps a search engine is effective at indexing pages with session I.D.'s and the like, but I prefer my user-friendly URL's being indexed for potential guests. Which is one of the advantages pointed out by dxlwebs.

As for the myths of unacceptable loads being placed on a server by using either Zoints or vBSEO and mod_rewrite, I have experience with both. Frankly, I witnessed more load by upgrading from vB 3.6 to 3.7 than in using either SEO package.

Of course none of this address the fact the Google Webmaster Central Blog uses 'pretty' URL's itself. Why do you suppose they bother, if it really makes no difference?

I think you've missed the distinction between rewriting URLs and brief descriptive filenames for web pages.