Gabriel Harper's Blog

Many years ago I didn’t know what a search engine friendly URL was. Now I practice human readable “search engine friendly URLs” whenever possible. When I stumbled upon the concept and started moving away from dynamic URLs to friendly, keyword rich URLs I noticed a direct and immediate positive impact on how much I was crawled and how well I was ranked in Google. Is that still the case? I still use friendly URLs whenever I can, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of agreement on the subject.

It seems clear that keywords in the domain name itself are highly preferable. Friendly URLs in general are not only more readable but simply more human, and give a bit of a taste of the link itself without anchor text or description. The most convincing and self-evident proof of being at least somewhat more desirable from a SEO standpoint is the tendency for URLs to be converted into links by publishing software. If an URL contains keywords related to the article, they are more likely to end up as anchor text in the most natural manner.

I’m trying to get everyone’s opinion over at eLanceTalk with my Impact of keywords in URLs on Google performance post. It would be great to see some more data on the direct impact. So far the most recent and applicable studies made publicly available are lackluster at best.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 7:34 am and is filed under SEO, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.