Does this URL need rewriting?

[BobGW]

Hello,

Does this URL need to be rewritten?

http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/modelingwithnlparticleandreas.html

Bob

[BobGW]

I'm actually not going to rewrite the URL since, based on the responses, it's not too spammy. I was just wondering if it was spammy since it was long and jumbled.

But what an awesome post by Paul Thompson! Taught me a couple of things!

Thanks!

[SajeetNair]

Hi Bob,

Some good points by Thompson Paul.

I am more interested in knowing how are you going to rewrite the URL?

The website is hosted on nginx/1.4.5.

I know about IIS Server - You require an ISAPI rewrite module. For Apache you can do it manually, but how would you go about doing it in this server?

• Sajeet

[ThompsonPaul]

If I were re-writing this URL, I'd do www.nlpca.com/DCweb/modeling-with-nlp.html in order to help the SEs understand the word boundaries in the keyword phrase.

But this is good example of getting lost in the weeds of SEO. Changing the URL is going to have only very slight effect. On the other hand, put bluntly, the article itself is very poorly optimised. You'd have vastly greater effect by spending your time improving the article itself instead of fussing with the URL. Prioritise the biggest effects first.

• I assume the target phrase is "modeling with NLP" and yet that phrase only appears in the meta title and title - nowhere else on the page. Obviously you don't want to spam the page with keywords, but only a single mention of the target phrase means you'll have a very hard time ranking the phrase. I realise it's a reposting of an existing article, but since it's your own article, there's no reason you can't update the content a little for web purposes. (If in fact you're targeting the term "NLP article" you're targeting far too broad (and essentially unrelated) a term with that page)
• The meta-description is essentially worthless as a call-to-action to encourage a searcher to want to read the page. It's awkwardly phrased and shows no value proposition to the searcher for reading.
• Page is visually a mass of text. I'm not a fan of decoration for the sake of decoration ("dancing macaroni" as my old designer friend calls it) but breaking this up with pull quotes, an appropriate related image, a flow chart etc would make it much more readable and less visually intimidating.
• The biggie: Page has only 1 incoming link and only 1 social share. Spending time getting social exposure and conversation going about the article would go a lot further than fussing with the URL. (Although the site also has no basic Open Graph schema, so that's a bit of a hindrance, but if you don't control the site, that point is probably moot).

So there's my perspective. Focus your time on the things that could seriously move the needle for the page, before fussing with a minor detail like changing the URL wording.

Dos that make sense?

Paul

[Stellar_SEO]

You could re-write it to be http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/modelingwithnlp  but you don't have too. What are you trying to accomplish with this page?