I turned them off. I checked various sites about SEO and search ranks and nowadays Google handles things differently than before - friendly URLs can lead to a worse ranking than normal dynamic URLs.
You clearly checked the wrong sites, or gleaned from them some slightly wrong information.
Friendly-URLs have little to no
benefit to SEO, and can indeed have drawbacks if they're very poorly implemented. But, by and large, a correctly implemented friendly-URL scheme has very significant benefits to customer experience and customer confidence. Unless your friendly URL scheme is profoundly broken, then I'd wholeheartedly advise that it remain turned on. Not a single one of our case study customers, our work for whom we've won said awards, has an "unfriendly" URL scheme.
Examples of "broken" Friendly-URL schemes would be overly permissive .htaccess rules which omit the terminating $ and thus permit URLs like:
http://www.myshop.de/products/myproduct/anyrandomgarbagethatmightaccidentallygetappendedtotheurldhjsdhksahdkjahskjah
From a customer perspective, a URL scheme is broken when deleting the product name from
http://www.myshop.de/products/product-name doesn't give you a sane page. This is obviously contrary to user expectations.
One of the key points in
Google's own guide is "Improve the structure of your URLs" ( find here:
http://static.google...arter-guide.pdf )
And Google also provide a guide prompting people to use "friendly" URLs:
http://support.googl...en&answer=76329
Ultimately the watchword here is "Customer". The idea of friendly-URLs is to be friendly to the users of your website, which I appreciate can be problematic in a multi-language website where those URLs might change. But Google also puts forth a solution to this problem:
http://googlewebmast...ltilingual.html
Sorry to jump on you with this, but you clearly care enough about SEO and UX to do
some research, so I'm working under the assumption that you would like to do things the right way.
