Reasons Not to Use Keywords in Your URL’s
April 26th, 2007 by Michael Gray in SEO, conferenceIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Generally speaking it’s a good idea to include keywords in your url structure whenever possible, however there are some instances when using an alternative method is more desirable.
If you have a page about blue widgets there are a few different ways to structure your URL’s:
http://example.com/blue-widgets/
http://example.com/bluewidgets/
However if you thought you were going to have more than blue widgets this would be more desirable url structure
http://example.com/widgets/blue/
http://example.com/widgets/red/
However is there’s anything that Web 2.0 and user generated content has taught us it’s that using the title to form the URL can have unpredictable results. You quite often end up with non keyword rich or focused URL’s instead you end up with things like this:
http://example.com/news/this_is_the_best_story_ever/
http://example.com/politics/is-this-guy-crazy/
http://example.com/cooking/matt-cutts-eat-babie/
http://example.com/look-ma-no-keywords-at-all/
The simple truth is that if your routine doesn’t eliminate “stop words” or funny punctuation or other issues with user generated words at some point down the road you’ll have problems (if you are on wordpress try the slug trimmer plugin it’s pretty good).
In addition to user generated input another key reason to use non keyword URL’s is Google news. There used to be this great post over at digital point sadly it’s gone now. You can get some of the info over on SERoundtable (here and here) but maybe if we nudge shoemoney he’ll make it a Monday question and give the info again. Simply Google news requires numeric URL’s (like they have over at SEL). There are a few other requirements but if you think you are going to have the author and editorial quality to possibly get into Google news do it right from the start rather than go back and try and fix it later, Google news can bring a really nice amount of traffic for the right kind of website.
So what’s the takeaway:
- Think about where you want to end up
- Are your URL’s generated by people who understand the value of keywords
- Is there a chance you might be able to get into Google news
For some cases non keyword URL’s are actually a better choice.
Sphere It
April 26th, 2007 at 6:02 am
There’s an overview of getting into Google News on my blog if it’s of any help:
http://www.evilgreenmonkey.com/articles/24/google-news-submission-part-1.html
April 26th, 2007 at 10:50 am
So the only reason not to use keywords in your URLs is to avoid changing your website’s entire structure if(/when, let’s be positive) you get into Google news?
As the chances of this happening with the websites of 99% of your readers is superlow I guess we all will stick to keyword-happy URLs.
NB: if you also throw in free lodging at your SEOclass I will definitely come
April 26th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Web Archive to the rescue
http://web.archive.org/web/20060528023805/http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=78165
You can read the first page of the thread and get a jist of what it was about. Shoemoney has a couple posts explaining a few things about Google News inclusion.
April 26th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Always wondered why Danny went with that kind of url structure. Are there any other benefits to having your urls in numeric form?
April 26th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Yep, Danny is a news junky for sure.
Sean - I guess the WayBackMachine does have it’s uses eh? =P
/12345.php
April 27th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Nice work Sean!
April 27th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Michael here a WP question for you:
How would you create the /widgets/blue/ slug in Wordpress? I make my url structure in WP like http://www.kensavage.com/cool-watches-for-men/
Are you saying it’s better in general to change my WP permalink structure to be /category/%postname%/ from just /%postname%/
April 27th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
if you have posts and not pages wordpress gets wonkadoodle when you change structure mid stream. You can’t say leave these old ones and only fix the new ones. I’ve done it here, and you can survive but it ain’t fun or pretty.
April 30th, 2007 at 8:28 am
I’m really interested in this topic of how to structure the URL’s in Wordpress, since I’m about to setup blogs for some of my customers.
I’ve noticed that someone who has done an extensive statistical analysis of on-page factors as they relate to position in search engine results uses the default URL setup in his wordpress blog: http://www.jamesbrausch.com .
If you can afford the subscription at his http://www.RaSof.com you can actually get detailed comparisons of your pages to the results of the data gathered from analyzing the details of all parts of thousands and thousands of high ranking pages in the serp’s.
April 30th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Thats a different approach. But then again - google seems to be more concerned with your content and less concerned with what the url looks like - heck a lot of sites that just have /?id=4 still get ranked.