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

Read more…