Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Does Google Need Easy To Read Urls?

Posted by Daniel on 4/21/2008 at 4:29 AM ET 250 Points
I have been advised the following by our SEO provider:

"Google (or search engines in general) needs to see easy to read URLs. A URL such as https://www.finetravel.co.nz/shop/UK+%26+EUROPE/Flights+to+the+UK+%26+Europ... does not make much sense to Google.

Google would not like the %,+ or numbers. An example of the way we build sites, provides clean URL's which are easy for search engines to read e.g. https://www.interioreffects.co.nz/products/flush-bolts/dust-sockets/

Google needs content to make your site credible, therefore you should have easy to read URL's so that Google can read the content on the page. "

Is there industry consensus on this point? Do search engines, Google in particular, need URLs that are easier to read in order to rank a page / site highly?

Thank you all in advance for your thoughts.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Inbox_Interactive on 4/21/2008 at 7:14 AM Member
    Nice URLs are easier for visitors to understand, too, especially when they are are looking at search results.

    Thing is, many sites are database driven, so you don't get those nice word-based paths.

    If possible, implement "mod rewrite" on your site so that you can rename those weird looking URLs on the fly.

  • Posted by darcy.moen on 4/21/2008 at 9:33 AM Member
    I think your SEO expert is fishing around for a nice way to ask you if your Content Management System has a SEF (Search Engine Friendly) function.

    Google will rank web sites that has certain characters in the URL, but it has been reported that Content Management Systems (CMS) that have a Question Mark ( ? ) in generated URLS may not rank where they should. Adding a SEF component or module that re-writes URLs to remove < ? > from URLs has helped some of the web sites I SEO.

    Using a re-write to create SEF urls can help score better when your targeted KEY WORDS appear in the URL in addition to in your content and in your meta tags. The more places where your targeted keywords appear, the more spiders and search engines can guide folks to your web sites.

    Some SEF engines are better than others at accomplishing URL re-writes. Mod Re-write is one way, but it's usually part of apache (part of the web server software). SEF re-writers that are well written (coded by design) can do more than mod rewrite, offering more control.

    Hope this helps you.

    Darcy Moen
    Customer Loyalty Network
  • Posted on 4/21/2008 at 1:03 PM Member
    Yes, it is better for search engines if you have nice clean, keyword-rich URLs that relate to the content of the page. However, there are other more important factors, like the page title and content of the page. Also, the most important factor is the number and quality of links into the page and website.

    You might also want to run a report with the free SEO tool Website Grader - you'll get a report with other SEO advice about your website.
  • Posted by excellira on 4/21/2008 at 2:33 PM Accepted
    Here is Google's take: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329&query=...

    If you were a client and had the budget I would recommend rewriting them as well but not completely for the purposes of search engines. Search engines are doing a fantastic job indexing "nasty" URLs these days. And, as you will see, Google is indexing your site https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Afinetravel.co.nz&btnG=Search with 487 pages indexed. The question is, how many pages do you actually have?

    In Yahoo you have 1,740 pages indexed. https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch;_ylt=Ap8k7MI8Ghcy.XEE_ejCJT...

    You do seem to have a small Canonical URL issue: the "non-www" URL has a few less pages indexed at 1,736. Please refer to my articles:
    www vs. non www – How should I structure my URL? https://www.trinitysem.com/2007/06/18/choosing-www-vs-non-www-url/
    WWW or Not - WWWhat’s in a Name https://www.trinitysem.com/2007/06/06/canonical-url-www-vs-no/

    Since the number of pages indexed in Yahoo is significantly greater you must begin to determine the reason for Google overlooking over 1,000 pages. Perhaps your URLs may have something to do with it. Google is more discerning than other SEs so there are duplicate content/meta tag possibilities as well but this is something your SEO will need to investigate.

    One of the main reasons you should consider rewriting the URLs (apart from having all your pages inexed) is usability.

    Here is a URL to a page on your site:
    https://www.finetravel.co.nz/shop/SOUTH+PACIFIC/Norfolk+Island/Norfolk+Isla...

    The URL length is too long for humans to find useful.

    Were I to recommend revising this URL i'd do the following:

    Change "+" to "-". It's much easier to read.

    The "/shop/" in the url is completely worthless and should be elminated. If you can't eliminate for some reason (It can be done) I recommend replacing it with a kewyord.

    On a Linux box it's best to use all lower case. Because
    https://www.finetravel.co.nz/shop/ and
    https://www.finetravel.co.nz/Shop/
    are completely different URLs and will take the visitor to separate pages (or a 404 error) resulting in confusion. It’s also much more difficult to read a URI to someone on the phone if you have to specify upper-case characters.

    While you're at it, why not rid the URL of the .html extensions and go extensionless. So this:
    https://www.finetravel.co.nz/shop/UK+%26+EUROPE/Flights+to+the+UK+%26+Europe.html
    Becomes:
    https://www.finetravel.co.nz/UK-EUROPE/Flights+to+the+UK+%26+Europe
    Here are some good reasons why as well as a good primer on writing good URI: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

    Elminate character encoding: "%26"

    Eliminate stop words if they are not specifically part of a keyword string:
    https://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=searchguides.html&ctx=bas...

    Final product?
    Start: https://www.finetravel.co.nz/shop/SOUTH+PACIFIC/Norfolk+Island/Norfolk+Isla...
    Finish: https://www.finetravel.co.nz/travel/south-pacific/norfolk-island-sightseein...
    where "/travel" may be optional if it doesn't benefit SEO.

    CAUTION: If you make any changes to the URL structure you should implement proper 301 redirects from the old page(s) to the new page(s) to avoid losing your hard-earned backlinks, indexing, rankings and subsequently traffic on the old pages.

    I hope this helps.

    Regards,

    Greg Hill
    Trinity Search Engine Marketing
  • Posted by saul.dobney on 4/23/2008 at 4:23 AM Member
    If the SEO firm is claiming that Google doesn't like + or %, then I'd get another SEO firm. This one doesn't know what he's talking about. In reality Google doesn't appear to mind. Content, keyword density and links into the site are much more important.

    Clean URLs are useful however in emails and other communications for example using https://www.finetravel.co.uk/offers in an advert.

    So you may decide to clean up some or all URLs for aesthetic purposes, but remember that users expect the URL to work in a certain way. In particular, being able to cut elements from the URL to get somewhere else.

    So if you have https://www.finetravel.co.nz/shop/UK-Europe/Flights then you need to make sure that

    https://www.finetravel.co.nz/shop is the index page for the shop and

    https://www.finetravel.co.nz/shop/UK-Europe is a page collecting all the links for Europe.

    In general, I'd advise that you find a database driven tool for the URL rewriting that you can edit via a web-browser. It's much more effective and efficient than building the rewrites by hand. It should allow you to modify and update rewriters dynamically as you add content and enable multiple names to point at a single page.
  • Posted by Daniel on 4/26/2008 at 8:12 PM Author
    Thank you to all of you who took the time to provide such comprehensive responses to my question. It is clear that there is some great experience within the Marketing Profs community.

    We will add this issue to our list to be resolved but I was pleased to learn that it was not as fundamental as we were lead to believe. We are somewhat limited as we purchased an off the shelf type website. This worked well for a small company, however any time we need to look to modifications we get hit with extra monthly fees.

    The other tips provided were also greatly appreciated. Since posting we have gone through the process of adding more relevant, keyword rich content to the homepage and the key destination pages that flow from there. I'll also be posting another question shortly regarding linking.

    Many thanks again to all.

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