Today again I heard the interesting developer comment that "nice" urls, search engine friendly urls and most important – user friendly urls are not possible because of so much dynamic content

Other developers – also working for big companies – kept telling me that it's so much effort to implement —- we were talking about 5-10 hours work for a product database application keeping 30,000 of a company's products !

Well

- Amazon with it's 1,500,000 product pages can do static urls.

- ebay with it's xxx,yyy,000 auction pages can do static urls.

Because they are doing URL-rewriting, means that complex URLs are rewritten to better readable urls, yet containing the same information. That's not very hard to accomplish once you know the concepts.

Example:

http://www.mysite.com/content.php?forum=92&article=1350

can easily look like

http://www.mysite.com/forum92/1350.htm

and it's more search-engine friendly / means it's an important step towards search engine indexing optimization

So here we go with some reading:

mod_rewrite: A Beginner's Guide to URL Rewriting

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/guide-url-rewriting

An Introduction to Redirecting URLs on an Apache Server for mod_rewrite beginners

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/82.htm

Using mod_rewrite to remove session IDs

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/1350.htm

More reading – all details

URL Rewriting Guide

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Some of my older posts on url-rewriting

• Url-Rewriting Mind boggler
• Homepage 301 Redirects with mod_rewrite
• Google Optimizing with mod_rewrite url rewriting

And of course there are some experts on URL rewriting that you can always hire for some consultation on that topic… :-)

Url Rewriting with mod_rewrite is not rocket science or brain surgery as long as you are capable to write and understand the rules of regular expressions.