Am I alone is my resentment of SEO and "Friendly URLs" It seems we have to sacrifce a great deal of time and money to make a URL that Google likes.  I really feel that it is ethically wrong that they essentially control what our URLs look.

Have a look at this ridiculous URL:

http://www.thousandislandslife.com/BackIssues/Archive/tabid/393/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/81/More-than-a-Salad-Dressing-and-ldquoSeersquos-Famous-Old-Time-Candiesrdquo.aspx

How is that good for anybody?  If I ruled the world, that would be www.thousandislandslive.com/page.aspx?article=81.  Does Google really penalize search results for pages that have querystrings?  And if so, am I alone in thinking that it is evil?  With almost all valid web content residing in databases, why would a querystring be bad?

I am just curious as to other's thoughts.

Mike

As an example, check out this search for "DotNetNuke Performance"

I have a very nice looking and short page name called PageBlaster.aspx down at the bottom of page one.

But notice all the pages that are ranked higher in the results. The keywords DotNetNuke and Performance are in the Urls of those pages.

So I just added a 301 redirect and my new page name is http://www.snapsis.com/DotNetNuke-Performance-Caching-Compression-Optimization.aspx

Lets see how far up I move :)

In general, the page name should be the same or a condensed version of what you would use a title of an article or a document.

I'm sure you realize it but, "... we have the most relevent content of all the sites ahead of us."  is very subjective. 
I get your point about why does google get to be the judge of that, but the answer is because they do it better than any other search engine.