Things to pay attention when rewriting URLs

Most common advice you may get for SEO is to rewrite dynamic URLs to static ones. It's not hard to do so. But several things you should keep in mind when doing so: First, avoid special characters like %, $ in the URLs. If you have to use them, annotate those before you put them alive. Sometimes, such characters will make your URLs unreachable. Second, restrict all old, dynamic URLs by using robots.txt. So that search engines will not consider new URLs as duplicate pages. Third, when using title, keywords, or product names as your URLs, you may consider add a short unique section id after the new URL in case that same title, keyword, or product name will show up in the future. Last but not least, rewriting URLs may affect your ranking temporarily. The reason is that you block old URLs, which may have already been indexed and ranked well, and search engines need time to index and rank new URLs. It may take weeks, even months to get back where you have been. However, there is no doubt that you will benefit from rewriting URLs in long term.