Are SEO Friendly URLS Less Important Now That Google Is Indexing Breadcrumb Markup?

[jessekanman]

Hi Moz Community and staffers,

Would appreciate your thoughts on the following question:

**Are SEO friendly URLS less important now that Google is indexing breadcrumb markup in both desktop and mobile search? **

Background that inspired the question:

Our ecommerce platform's out of the box functionality has very limited "friendly url" settings and would need some development work to setup an alias for more friendly URLS.  Meanwhile,  the breadcrumb markup is implemented correctly and indexed so it  seems there's no longer an argument for improved CTR with SEO friendly URLS .

With that said I'm having a hard time justifying the URL investment, as well as the 301 redirect mapping we would need to setup, and am wondering if more friendly URLs would lead to a significant increase in rankings for level of effort? Sidenote: We already rank well for non-brand and branded searches since we are brand manufacturer with an ecommerce presence.

Our breadcrumbs are much cleaner & concise than our URL structure. Here are a couple examples.

Category URL: http://www.mysite.com/browse/category1/subcat2/subcat3/_/N-7th
Breadcrumb: www.mysite.com > category1 > subcat2 > subcat3

Product URL:  http://www.mysite.com/product/product-name/_/R-133456E112
Breadcrumb: www.mysite.com > category1 > subcat2 > subcat3 > product name

The "categories" contain actual keywords just hiding them here in the example. According to my devs they can't get rid of the "_" but could possible replace it with a letter.  Also they said it's an easier fix to make the URLs always lower case. Lastly  some of our product URLS contain non-standard characters in the product name like "." and "," which is also a simpler fix according to my developers.

Looking forward to your thoughts on the topic!

Jesse

[Stewart_SEO]

Thanks - good question. I agree with a previous poster that any website should possess friendly URL'S, such is a given these days and ultimately aids user awareness and navigation. You really should carefully research and think about the time required for URLS rewrites - these can be quit dangerous and if not done properly can damage your rankings. Certainly breadcrumb trails are a big plus so that's something I would definitely recommend.

[Yoav-Blustein]

Hi Jesse

Google reading breadcrumbs is not really a new thing, its been around for years, i remember "optimizing" my breadcrumbs in 2009 to get the perfect "green breadcrumbs" on the results pages.

Friendly URLs are not used solo for SEO optimization, you should have user-friendly URLs regardless to your optimization efforts. It is one of the elements that users do pay attention. This being said, you will find enourmous amount websites ranking for very competitive keywords with URLs not even containing the keyword within the uri.
for example: xxx.com/product/t/121kl?sku=28971723dsa-black.
In my opinion having a friendly URL is important, it is one of the hundreds of ranking factors. The catch is that every other SEO expert puts a different weight on certain factors. There are many other ranking factors way more important then the friendly URL. I believe that every single factor is important, because i believe that the end product that the user gets must be as perfect as i can provide. And the end-results always speaks for themselves But again, this is not the end of the world, and i believe that your case is not that problematic. It's just that I am obsessed and always aim for perfection

Regarding the 301 mapping, if you choose to move forward with it, you do not need to move all URLs at once. You should go ahead and test couple of URLs to see how Google reacts, how long does it takes until google index is updated etc. (you probably will want to submit a new updated sitemap to get things move faster). There is always some ranking loss in 301 redirections, especially in the first couple of day/weeks. But it can be fixed with further SEO efforts.

Best

Yossi