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Do SEO-friendly URLs really affect a page's ranking? [closed]

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Does URL affect SEO ranking?

The answer is yes, the keywords you choose to include in the URL structure can definitely impact your SEO and rankings.

Why SEO friendly URLs are important?

URLs are the building blocks of your website and when optimized, can help increase your website traffic. Clean URLs perform better in search, appear more trustworthy, and make it easier to share.

How much does URL impact SEO?

While they do give weight to the authority of the overall domain itself, keyword use in a URL can also act as a ranking factor. While using a URL that includes keywords can improve your site's search visibility, URLs themselves generally do not have a major impact on a page's ability to rank.

Does changing URL affect rankings?

When doing so incorrectly, changing your URL will undo all your SEO work, triggering your website to plummet in ranking and search traffic. If you're considering changing your URL, beware.


I will let google answer to your question:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html

In the article:

Which can Googlebot read better, static or dynamic URLs? [...]While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static


Even if search engines didn't give your pages a better rank, you should still do it for the users. Any benefit for SEO is just icing on your site.

SEOmoz had an article with suggestions for URL best practices along with reasons why each is helpful for usability or search engines.


I don't think this question is readily answerable except by anecdotal evidence, since no two pages are "otherwise equivalent" enough to measure in the sense you're asking. Beyond a Google search engineer emerging and divulging the answer, if one exists that's limited to only this property, you're unlikely to get a definitive answer; more likely, you'll get a long stream of most-likelies.

But I do like the suggestion that descriptive URLs improve the user experience; I think that's true with respect to short URLs, definitely (e.g., "/help", or "/ask", etc.). One just has to decide how valuable that benefit is to the project, when weighed against the cost of creating such URL schemes, which can sometimes be pricey; I've had a couple of clients who've spent thousands on exactly this effort, with no measurable effect in search ranking whatever.


Keyword frequency and pagerank are really the two main factors in SEO.

It follows, then, that including keywords in your URLs is desirable.

e.g. http://my_site.com/article/keyword is better than http://mysite.com/article/42


All else being equal, both pages will achieve the same pagerank. Pagerank is determined by how many people link to you and what their page rank is. So, it does not affect your pagerank.

But it does affect how high you will end up in the search results. In the search index, not only page rank but also keyword relevance matters. If you have the keywords in your url and someone searches for them, then your page will be more relevant and be higher in the search results. Also, when people link to you then the keyword-rich URLs they use to link to you will also improve your relevance.

Don't stare yourself blind at pagerank. It doesn't matter that much. What matters is that you get found by people. Pagerank is only a small (and ever decreasing) part of that.