I know that this has been discussed before and I know that there will possible be no definite answers, but I would like to throw in what I have found so far on the question as to whether changing the dynamic Xoop Urls to short, static URLs might have a positive effect on search engine results.
The problem I have with my little website at http://www.thevital.net is that whilst the main page has a page rank of 5 out of 10 at Google, none of the subpages is getting indexed, not one of them.
My research so far has produced to contradicting answers:
1. In the Google help section it is said that you need to have incoming links to your subpages, otherwise Google won't assign a pagerank to those pages and will therefore not index them.
2. I sent an email to Google support and was told that, whilst Google is capable of following dynamic pages, only a small amount of them will make it into their databases, because they can cause problems for their crawler.

I've written to Google again, asking for clarification, as this seems to contradict the advice they give in their help section.

I am reluctant to apply the ShortUrl hack, trying to get it work, if it is not certain that it will help my pages to get indexed.

I will keep you updated on Google's response, but would appreciate your thoughts in the meantime.

Stefan

I did a small test just now.

I found a forum post and made a search for a phrase from that post in google as follows

"You are still welcome to send PM's to the webmasters with enquiries such as these:"

Google returned a specific and correct result for the forum post

see the search result Here.

Google will crawl pages within a XOOPS website. I can repeat that test with every page on my own modest site. It has deep crawled every piece of public available content.

Point 1- Google is the only SE that really serves my pages, other engines like yahoo, hotbot sniff around and occasionally throw out a few referals, but not much.

I even used the short URL hack (reynaldo's) for several months, resubmitted to SEs and zilch... absolutely no change in referals.

Thats my experience. My site content is good, inasmuch that preceeding my XOOPS website, the exact same content was in plain html and crawled by ALL the major search engines. It was a task to keep up with them all.

There are other tricks to optimise SEs listed in the FAQ section, but ultimately, it's query strings that keep many SEs away from your content.

This is a well known fact and well documented in third party papers and forums dedicated to SEO. The argument goes that the shortURL hack re-writes these URLs with query strings into SE friendly addresses. Well maybe, but my experience, as I stated above did not appear to change search engine behaviour.

For me, the jury is still out, but I'm willing to appraise any evidence that supports the effectivness of these hacks

I can concur that google will deep crawl a XOOPS site. I get the same results when testing from my pages. The good thing is with google crawling it seems that the information does filter to other search engines.

Now another new bot that seems to do some very deep crawling on my site (and as per its website does it slowly and methodically as not to be a burden on the site) is become.com. I have seen logs of this one hitting every page.

So I guess if google can do it and become.com can do it then it seems the problem is with the other bots that can't do it.
A lot of websites use database storage which requires queries.

Here's a typical example of what the problem and solution is about from The web developers journal

Searching Google with 'search engines query strings' will returns a lot of information on this subject.