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The Webmaster Guidelines at Google have been adjusted to permit the indexing of pages carrying a parameter that the Googlebot previously ignored.

Once upon a time, Google insisted that site publishers should be careful not to make this mistake, according to a post by Vanessa Fox: "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index."

Like Prohibition's ban on making, selling, or transporting alcohol, the &id= parameter ban has been lifted. URLs containing the formerly offending parameter are being welcomed with all eight of Googlebot's open spidery arms.

As Google has stated before, lots of parameters in a dynamic URL could be a bad thing:

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
"Rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you," Fox said.

"If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic URLs."

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.