Dynamic URL

Dynamic URLs are web addresses that are generated by a website on the fly, usually in response to either a query or a database lookup. They can often contain certain parameters, symbols, and strings, rather than simple, readable words.

You can usually recognise dynamic URLs by the use of question marks, ampersands, and equals signs, and they often look a little like this:

example.com/products?id=123&category=shoes&sort=price

These dynamic URLs usually contrast with their static counterparts, which are clean and easy to read, looking instead more like:

example.com/shoes/running

The chances are that you’ve already seen plenty of dynamic URLs when browsing the internet. They’re especially common on eCommerce sites, search results pages, and just about any website that generates content from a database.

What are Dynamic URLs?

There’s nothing wrong with dynamic URLs, and modern search engines handle them much better today than they did years ago. Google is largely capable of crawling and indexing just about any URL, including those with parameters, without much trouble.

This means that the old advice to keep away from dynamic URLs in SEO is pretty outdated. In fact, they form a pivotal part of how many websites work, and you don’t need to feel like panicking if your URLs contain parameters.

Although dynamic URLs aren’t inherently bad, they do, however, raise a few considerations that are worth keeping on top of, especially if you have a website that uses them a lot.

URL Challenges

One of the biggest issues is that parameters can multiply the number of URLs your website has and create duplicate content. The same product page could be reachable through many different parameter combinations, with sorting, filtering, session IDs, and tracking tags all combining to create a distinct URL that essentially shows the same content.

On larger sites, this effect can balloon into thousands of URLs that are almost duplicates of each other, splitting ranking signals and eating through crawl budget as Google wastes its efforts looking through endless variations of the same page.

When this happens, your otherwise harmless URLs can become a challenge that’s worth addressing sooner rather than later.

Another consideration is more focused on humans than machines. Easy-to-read and descriptive URLs are great to help your leads remember and trust your website’s pages. They may even include relevant keywords that can help to provide some form of signal about their topics and purpose.

Slug URLs like /running-shoes can be far more appealing in a search result compared to their dynamic counterparts, making them more sharable and much clearer in general.

With this in mind, even though Google is more than capable of handling dynamic URLs, there are some user-experience and SEO considerations that can become more of an advantage if you opt for clean URLs within your site, particularly for your more important pages where you have the choice.

Using Dynamic URLs

The best way to live with dynamic URLs is to find a useful balance. For your most important and indexable pages, always look to create clean, static-looking URLs with proper URL rewriting wherever your platform allows it.

Parameter-driven URLs are a part of life for many website owners, and when you need to deploy a dynamic URL, it’s best to manage the duplication with canonical tags to point parameter variations at the clean master version while structuring your site so that parameters used for sorting and filtering don’t end up creating endless indexable duplicates.

The goal here isn’t to get rid of your dynamic URLs, which is neither necessary or possible in many cases, but instead to make sure that they don’t create a high volume of duplicate content that confuses search engines in a way that can harm your rankings.