Pretty URLs... do they matter?
-
Given the following urls:
example.com/warriors/ninjas/cid=WRS-NIN01
Is there any difference from an SEO perspective? Aesthetically the 2nd bugs me but that's not a statistical difference.
Thank you
-
Tom, there is undoubtedly a difference, speaking broadly in terms of the use of query strings - at the SEO level - and at the usability / customer retention level.
URLs that are easy to read are easier to remember and easier to copy-paste too - meaning more robust - less likely to break or get corrupted when run through text parsers.
Google is explicit about their preference for clean urls, and a clean url structure for your site as a whole. I'm not sure if this is relevant to where you're at with your particular project, but I always try build a site with a url schema that exposes the information architecture and content priority as much as possible, usually with important pages close to the site root.
If you have to use query strings - and of course they are sometimes unavoidable, or actually just the best tool for the job at hand - Google Webmaster Tools allows you to provide explicit classifications for each parameter. Personally I thought this was a great addition to their suite of tools.
-
I read it, and the most relevant bit seems to be:
"Not ideally use parameters. If they need to be used the amount of parameters should be limited to two or fewer."
Is there any research that supports that 0 params is better then 1, and 1 is better than 2, etc?
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL structure for am International website with subdirectories
Hello, The company I am working for is launching a new ecommerce website (just a handful of products).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lvet
In the first phase, the website will be English only, but it will be possible to order internationally (20 countries).
In a second phase, new languages and countries will be added. I am wondering what is the best URL structure for launch: Start with a structure similar to website.com/language/content (later on we will add other languages than english) Start with a structure similar to website.com/country/content
3) Start with a structure similar to website.com/country-language/content (at the beginning it will be all website.com/country-en/content) What do you think? Cheers
Luca0 -
301 Redirects to relative URLs not absolute a problem?
Hi we recently did a migration and a lot of content changed locations see: https://d.pr/i/RvqI81 Basically, the 301 goes to the correct location but its a relative URL (as you can see from the screenshot) rather than absolute URL. Do you think this is a high priority issue from an SEO standpoint, should we get the developer to change the redirects to absolute? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Short Url vs Medium Urls ?
Hello Moooooooooooz ! I got a SEO fight today and though the best would be to involve more people into the fight ! 😛 Do you think it's better to get A- company.com/services/service1.html or B- company/service1.html I was for A as services is also googled to find the service1. I also think that it's better to help google to understand where the service is on the website My friend was for B as URL has to stay as short as possible What do you think ? ps: I can create the URL I want using Joomla and Sh404. The websites has 4 different categoies: /about, /services/ products, /projects Tks ! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AymanH0 -
Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash?
Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash? www.example.com/services Or www.example.com/services**/** Does Google consider these to be the same link or does Google treat them as different links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Changing URLS - wondering about implications
We are in the process of changing our URLs from dynamic to more SEO friendly. The website is ciee.org and I'm specifically talking about ciee.org/study. While we work with the business to get approval for ciee.org/study-abroad, we are going with ciee.org/study/abroad. Can anyone foresee any difficulties or negative implications that could come if we change from study/abroad to study-abroad all within 6 months? Thank you in advance!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CIEEwebTeam0 -
No index, follow vs. canonical url
We have a site that consists almost entirely as a directory of videos. Example here: http://realtree.tv/channels/realtreeoutdoorsclassics We're trying to figure out the best way to handle pagination and utility features such as sort for most recent, most viewed, etc. We've been reading countless articles on this topic, but so far have been unable to determine what might be considered the industry standard. Two solutions seem to stand out... Using the canonical url on all the sorted and paginated pages. However, after reading many blog posts, it seems that you should NEVER use the canonical url to solve the issue of paginated, and thus duplicated content because the search bots will never crawl past the first page leaving many results not in the index. (We are considering ruling this method out.) Another solution seems to be using the meta tag for noindex, follow so that a search engine like Google will crawl your directory pages but not add them to the index themselves. All links are followed so content is crawled and any passing link juice remains unchanged. However, I did see a few articles skeptical of this solution as well saying that there are always better alternatives, or that there is no verification that search engines obey this meta tag. This has placed some doubt in our minds. I was hoping to get some expert advice on these methods as it would pertain to our site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0 -
Limiting URLS in the HTML Sitemap?
So I started making a sitemap for our new golf site, which has quite a few "low level" pages (about 100 for the golf courses that exist in the area, and then about 50 for course architects), etc etc. My question/open discussion is simple. In a sitemap that already has about 50 links, should we include these other low level 150 links? Of course, the link to the "Golf Courses" is there, along with a link to the "Course Architects" MAIN pages (which, subdivides on THOSE pages.) I have read the limit is around 150 links on the sitemap.html page and while it would be nice to rank long tail for the Golf Courses. All in all, our site architecture itself is easily crawlable as well. So the main question is just to include ALL the links or just the main ones? Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO0 -
Migrating a site with new URL structure
I recently redesigned a website that is now in WordPress. It was previously in some odd, custom platform that didn't work very well. The URL's for all the pages are now more search engine friendly and more concise. The problem is, now Google has all of the old pages and all of the new pages in its index. This is a duplicate problem since content is the same. I have set up a 301 redirect for every old URL to it's new counterpart. I was going to do a remove URL request in Webmaster Tools but it seems I need to have a 404 code and not a 301 on those pages to do that. Which is better to do to get the old URL's out of the index? 404 them and do a removal request or 301 them to the new URL? How long will it take Google to find these 301 redirects and keep just the new pages in the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0