As I said in the previous post in this series, a lot of what used to be regarded as very potent SEO magic simply doesn’t have the same impact it did even a few short years ago. For example, Google now completely ignores the keywords meta tag because it has been abused to the point of being totally useless. Instead of paying attention to gimmicks, search engines are focusing on getting better at analyzing the real content of a page as well as in the quality of the incoming links to that page.
So, now that your hopes of gaming Google have been thoroughly dashed, let me explain how URL formatting is still valuable and why you ought to make your URLs as pretty as possible.
Humans Read These Things
Generally it’s a good idea to stop thinking about machine and start thinking about people whenever you’re doing something to your site, this is especially important with URLs. Take the Google Webmaster Central blog link above, when hovering over that link and seeing the URL it leads to, users can make a pretty reasonable assumption about the content of the page they’ll be lead to by clicking on the link. That’s because the URL contains all the information you need to know about the content of the page:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
That link tells you not only the domain of the site, but also the date of the post (so you can tell if it’s still relevant), as well as the title of the post. Imagine if the same page had this URL format:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/blogs.aspx?id=5460879298
What does that tell you about the content? Nothing. In fact, it’s sort of scary looking. There’s no “click appeal” to this sort of URL.
This logic extends beyond just hovering over links in the browser. It also applies to links copied into emails and links copied into social networking and bookmarking services.
The SEO impact happens when your nice, pretty URLs encourage people to link to you more often. Incoming links are one of the most surefire ways to boost your rankings in search engines, so anything you can do to make more links happen more often, is worth considering.
The Effort is Minimal
Why not put in the effort to make your URLs pretty and comprehensible by people when most content management systems (CMS) have pretty URL options built-in so that changing them is literally a few clicks away.
WordPress’s “Day and name” permalink option can be implemented in about 4 clicks in addition to changing your .htaccess permissions using your FTP client. More can be found at the Codex (the WordPress bible).
Similarly with Drupal and Joomla, the effort needed to make your URLs a little nicer and friendlier should be less than an hours work.
The Importance of Being Earnest in URLs
Some folks suggest that including information such as dates in URLs is a bad thing. These opponents of including dates in URLs claim that dates are both irrelevant information and give the appearance of content being “stale.” But of course both of these things can’t be true. If a post’s being “stale” matters to a search engine user, then dates are relevant and should be included in URLs.
In general, whenever an SEO expert is telling you to make something appear to be something it isn’t or to obfuscate what a piece of content really is, they’re selling you useless advice. The entire point of SEO is to make content that users want to find more findable. Serving up pages that are either dated, unrelated, or little more than a series of affiliate marketing ads doesn’t accomplish that and hurts everyone’s experience online.
Bottom line, users respect sites that are open about what their content is, not sites that play games with their content. If you want to create a loyal following of readers and grow your brand, concentrate on regularly producing good content, not page-view-boosting shenanigans.
There’s Still Some Impact on Search
Last and very much least, URL structure still has some impact on search engine ranking, moreso with Bing and Yahoo! than the more savvy and well-equipped Google, but it does matter. Having dates and keywords displayed in URLs gives both of those items weight and will help to make sure that your most up-to-date and relevant information is served up to potential visitors.
Cord is the director of new media at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He has been a web developer for over a decade, working with non-profits to rein in their web development costs and grow their online audiences through simple best practices.
