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URL Structure And SEO
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About the Author
Rebecca Appleton (166 Posts)
Rebecca is the managing director of search engine optimization agency Dakota Digital a full-service agency offering SEO, online PR, web copywriting, media relationship management, and social media strategy. Rebecca works directly with each client to increase online visibility, brand profile, and search engine rankings. She has headed a number of international campaigns for large brands.
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[...] URL Structure And SEO, Search Marketing Standard [...]
Rebecca,
This is a great summary. A few comments, though:
1) I wouldn’t use + in a URL. This has to do with various encoding problems it can present. It’s easier to use dashes and underscores, and there’s no advantage to +. + is also -technically- the same as an encoded space. Why the inventors of the WWW decided to make a special exception for it, I do not know. I believe a %20 is the same thing. Spaces work as well, when they’re quoted (though this is probably incorrect).
Anything that’s ever encoded is much more likely to get mangled by browsers, parsers, sanitizers, aliens, etc. They’re tasty when it comes to bugs.
2) Historically, I also do throw IDs into URLs. Our new CMS platform obviates the need for it. eCommerce stuff still uses them. IDs generally make it easier to migrate content to a new URL or a new page down the road because it’s a primary key/identifier. It’s a tossup, because everything you’ve said is totally true.
/Foo/Bar.html is much better than …
/Foo-C1/Bar-P2.html
But once you use just copy, it creates a big mess if you want to move things around. No more ID, and this makes it harder for programmers.
–
Jaimie Sirovich
President
SEO Egghead, Inc.
RELEASED: Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP & ASP.NET (Wrox Press)
http://www.seoegghead.com/our-seo-book/search-engine-optimization-with-php.seo
http://www.seoegghead.com/our-seo-book/search-engine-optimization-with-asp-net.seo
Thanks for the insightful article.
I think URL structures make a very significant impact. I have noticed that short and sweet urls tend to do much better in search results that very long keyword stuffed urls.
Thought I should add that you’d want to go no deeper than 3 directory levels, and if you’re no familiar with canonicalization to look into it.
A concise, straight-forward summary that is a good primer for SEO newbies. Thanks
This is a really good article and features points that we have been debating as part of our SEO strategy, I can use this article as a reference when we have our next meeting. Thanks
Good articles, and i think much better if you take most imformation keywords close to your domain.
domain/keywords/../../
Some good points, but really the .html is considered superfluous these days. As is the www.
Tim Berners Lee wrote “Cool URIs don’t change” and that’s sort of the “must read” on the topic.
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
I’m curious what your opinion is about the effect of establishing multiple URLs (which resolve to a single site) can have on SEO?
For example a company named ABC Associates has an established website with a URL of “ABCAssociates.com”. The company performs plastic molding and manufactures Drive Cams. Would it benefit them from an SEO perspective to register additional URL’s such as “DriveCams.com” and “Plasticmolding.com” and resolve them back to “ABCAssociates.com”?
Thanks, it is very useful for me.
but how about an ongoing website? the urls already existed, what if i changed them to new urls? how about the old urls?
Thanks.
.-= joker´s last blog ..Men and beer in common =-.
“Your Choice Of File Extension Matters”
DLL, EXE and BIN as file extensions? I haven’t come across them as web pages yet, so it really doesn’t matter if they aren’t because they’re not pages at all.
.-= Elmer´s last blog ..10 Most Read SEO Hong Kong Articles of 2009 =-.
Great article – really useful for the SEO newbie and old pros alike. We’ve written a brief guide on best practices for url structure which goes well with this article – it includes a few extra pointers as well. Hopefully, it will help people to get their site set up in the best possible way:
best practices in url structure for best seo performance.
Cheers!
[quote]Google’s Matt Cutts has gone on record as saying the search engine is happy to crawl any of those pages and it doesn’t really matter which extension you choose of the three.[/quote]
So you say that html, htm, php is valid, but bin etc is not.
Then what about .hey, .id22 etc…
?
really nice information for url structure but still i am confusing about this topic.
can anybody suggest me?
http://www.test.com/product/old-computer.html
or
http://www.test.com/old-computer.html
which one is best url structure?
[...] directory systems that match the hierarchy of a website’s taxonomy, to silo content, and to keep URLs short and simple. However, some might argue that using directories may push keywords used in the page name beyond [...]
I have seen an improvement on performance of tertiary pages when we have removed necessary directories like /products/. This is great information, thanks for putting this together!