I have been looking at URLs a lot recently and trying to work out how much they really matter. The quality of URLs is one of many parts to the whole SEO debate that is difficult to negotiate because of so many different views on topic, all with different levels of authority. I have no authority at all really so am keen to investigate using sources that do.

Google’s own SEO starter guide (Pages 8-9 are most relevant to URLs), has some useful insight but doesn’t answer all the questions.

For example, it list 3 best practices for URLs…

• Use Words in URLs – sounds sensible, since words are easier to read than numbers. But how relevant do those words need to be?
• Create a Simple Directory Structure – This deserves a little more discussion, see below…
• Provide one version of a URL to reach a document – This also makes sense given the various rules around duplicate content

In terms of keeping a simple directory structure Google states…

“Avoid having deep nesting of subdirectories like ‘…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/’ “

Google doesn’t explain the reason behind not having a deep nesting. But notably they do not say they do not index pages with a deep structure. One way to get round this would be to have a series of pages that deep link to your content to help the indexer get the the lower levels more quickly.

There is more information here from Google’s Official Webmaster Blog:

Myth: “Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters.”
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short

This is discussed further is an interview with some Google Boffin called Matt Cutts. He says that…

“If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.”

But I think what he is talking about here is URLs that just spam keywords to try and artificially improve their page rank…

“The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: “How does this look to a regular user?” – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go and check that out. So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users – and not have it come across as keyword stuffing.”

Some commentators get bogged down with “parameters”, such as www.something.com/anothing/thing?text=3435&id=dsamm, but many URLs don’t have these rather ugly looking code suffixes since dynamic pages can cut up and generally rummage around with URLs without the need for any kind of directory structure or query string. I can’t yet decide whether Google makes any differenciation between query string parameters and URL directories.

Google also says in their starter guide “Avoid using directory names that have no relation to the content in them”. This suggests items that have no relation to the content are allowed but but will detract from your page rank and it encourages webmasters to use descriptive terms in their URLs.

I recently did some SEO analysis on the site of a leading electronics retailer. They have appalling SEO practices, both in terms of code structure, URLs and accessibility. However if you compare the rankings of a selection of their products with their competitors you actually find that they win every time. This is likely to be due to other factors such as external linking, brand popularity and their established internet presence in the market.

This little tool is quite useful (although this assumes you trust the creators) for seeing if your URLs looks ok. It does not rely on the URL being public, so you can try out different things to see if it looks like you are spamming or not.

Perhaps we should all get less bogged down in these kind of details and spend more time improving the quality of the site (removing all the cardboard?), its content and innovative functionality, which should drive influential sites to link through. That will have far more of a difference than some minor tweaks to the URL.