mod_rewrite: Am I being deluded?

Marketing
1

I’ve long understood that using mod_rewrite was good SEO practice, because it would allow me to create ‘pretty’ URLs in my links which Search Engines would index and then .htaccess would convert to query strings for database access and delivery of the required page.

However I’ve recently used a third party program (XML-sitemaps.com) to compile a sitemap and it has indexed all the query strings, having derived them from the pretty URLs via the .htaccess file. Thus instead of getting:

...
<url>
  <loc>http://www.holidaymull.co.uk/accommodation/hotels</loc>
</url>
...

in my sitemap, I get:

...
<url>
  <loc>http://www.holidaymull.co.uk/index.php?ac%5b1%5d=HO&amp;loc%5b0%5d=All&amp;accns=Search</loc>
</url>
...

which rather seems to defeat the object if I then present that to Google as (part of) my sitemap !
Is XML-sitemaps getting it wrong, or have I been deluded about the benefits of mod_rewrite all this time ? In other words, if I use the pretty URL in my link is Google going to ignore it and index the query string ?

2

Please disregard the above. I have subsequently found a bunch of old URLs with query strings, which was being picked up (correctly) by XML-sitemaps. Now that these have been removed, the sitemap is being compiled as expected.