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Say I rewrite a URL from www.exampleurl.com/article.asp?id=100&title=bacon-rashers to www.exampleurl.com/100/bacon-rashers will search engines try to crawl the folders '100' and 'bacon-rashers', which of course don't actually exist? Have Google or anyone written about this? I've done a quick search and can't find anything...

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Short answer: search engines treat the path as part of the URL string, not as a requirement that matching folders exist on the server. They will crawl whatever URLs they discover (through links, sitemaps, or referrals). They will not, by default, invent and probe “parent” directories unless those URLs are actually linked or returned by the server.

That said, follow a few practical rules. Consistently serve the canonical version of each page (use 301s when changing URLs and a rel="canonical" tag when needed). Make internal links and your sitemap point to the rewritten URLs so crawlers see the intended structure. Creating real landing pages for meaningful parent paths (as suggested) can help usability and indexing, but avoid creating thin or duplicate pages just to emulate folders — that can hurt more than help. And while is right that friendly URLs help, search engines index dynamic URLs too when implemented correctly.

Quick checks and troubleshooting: verify what Googlebot actually sees via Google Search Console’s URL Inspection and the Coverage report. Inspect server logs for the crawler user-agent to confirm which URLs were requested and what status codes were returned. Use a simple HTTP header check locally:

curl -I -A "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)" https://example.com/your-slug

Look for a 200 (or 301 when expected), proper canonical headers, and no accidental 404/302 chains. Those steps will show whether rewritten URLs are being crawled and indexed as intended.

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Member Avatar for Dani

I don't believe they will, especially since what you're proposing is a common way of rewriting URLs nowadays. However, for the absolute best navigation hierarchy (for both seo and usability, of course), it's a really good idea to actually create default pages for the two folders as part of your site's structure.

Member Avatar for vanilla23

I observe that can read but when we talking about ranking of website then we can lag behind because of dynamic url if we don't use url rewriting.

If we optimize this as title used in web page then it will be good in terms of ranking on search engines.

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