Thread: google and dynamic sites

The other avantage of using mod_rewrite to remove query strings is that a page without one is more likely to be cached by the client and/or proxy caches.

This means that subsequent requests can be served from the cache, which can help reduce load on the server and (most importantly for me) bandwidth usage.

You can still control what gets cached by using headers from php etc. So any truly dynamic pages will get refreshed at every request.

For content sites that are driven from databases this can make quite a big difference.

The only down side is, as some request don't reach the server, you could be getting a lot more visitors than you log files show. For me, the number of visitors/page views etc isn't that important.

My site has recently been spidered by AltaVista and that stripped off the ? args, so even if google is OK with them, other sites are not! Pages which are - or appear to be - static are best!