How Important is URL Naming?

see also: 301 Redirects on IIS located in the Domain and Web Hosting category

Written by Chris Oberst
March 13, 2006

We have a site that sells products. It's convenient internally to have the URL consist of the product item number.

In regards to search engine optimization, what do folks think about this... How important is it to have the product name or description in the URL? Is it important, borderline, or not important?

For example: www.mydomain.com/1001.html

Compared to: www.mydomain.com/football-shirt.html

If search engines do place a high value on URL naming, is it possible this leaves open abuse problems, where folks utilize naming just for traffic and not for relevancy, thus the benefit of changing to product name URL's might be short lived?

Chris Oberst

Written by AE Brantley
March 14, 2006

Unless you are willing to fight Google every three months to get reincluded, don't. Our URL is also a keyword that is bid on by our competitors. We are regularly dropped by Google and have to petition for re-inclusion. We're moving to a different domain name as fast as we can.

AE Brantley

Written by Ian Smith
March 14, 2006

The understanding I came away from the people at this years Search Engine Strategies conference was that it is really important to put information in the URL. Google (at least) uses it as one of the factors in determining page rank. I think it is more valuable if your website domain contains the key term, but file name is important too.

Also, don't forget that people can see the URLs. As I understand it, some folks did some tests using Google AdWords where they showed ads using just the normal domain name (zzz.com) and then showed a URL using the domain plus keyword (zzz.com/keyword). The one with the keyword in the URL had the better click rate.

Hope this helps!

Ian Smith

dottactics.blogspot.com

Written by Brad Waller
March 14, 2006

Chris asked about names in the URL path and if they helped with search engines. Interestingly enough, this very question was asked at the ad:tech 1MPACT conference I covered in LA last week.

Which one of these do you think will work better, particularly if you look at the factor of the person viewing the results who will see the URL:

1) mysite.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/69771/ref=dp_brlad_entry/104-5772225-1073 542

2) mysite.com/Books/Subjects/Computers_&_Internet/Home_&_Office/Internet/Online_Searching

Barbara Coll emphatically said that you are better off with real descriptive names in the path over numbers or nonsense. This does not have to be just for the page name, as it can fit the path for sites with hierarchy as you can see above. That said, she also advised that anything you do just for the search engine will eventually be seen as search spam. If you do it for the users, you can rarely go wrong.

Brad Waller

adjungle.com

Written by Magnus Brättemark
March 15, 2006

Hi Chris,

The advice I have seen from various SEO experts is that the URL has no importance at all. My own experience makes me doubt this. I made the architecture for my site long before I learned about SEO. Now I would like to change, but I'm afraid it might be too late since too many incoming links would be obsolete.

My site comes in three languages and I named the folders by the name of the language. When Google serves up ads they often display ads about English language schools on pages where the only keyword reference to English is the URL, the same goes for Spanish language schools on the Spanish pages and Swedish language schools on the Swedish pages.

If anyone knows how to change the wording in the URL without losing the incoming links, then I would be really happy!

Best regards,

Magnus Brättemark

Alfa Travel Guide - Central America

Written by Mike Banks Valentine
March 15, 2006

In regards to putting your keywords in the domain name, filenames and dynamic path (via URL rewrite rules on database calls).

I suggest that you simply do some searches for your targeted keyword phrases and look at the top ten or twenty results. The URL is displayed by Google in green text and you can simply review what is working for those top ranked sites. All industries are not the same and what works for a less competitive keyword phrase will rarely work as a single tactic for highly competitive phrases.

So don't spend a lot of time applying that single tactic because your keyword searches show all the top ranking sites doing that one thing. While you are at the top sites you have to look at whether they use all the other ingredients to effective SEO.

The really critical thing to focus on was how Chris Oberst asked the question:

> How important is it to have the product name or description

> in the URL? Is it important, borderline, or not important?

Chris is obviously aware that there is a range of possibility. Among the choices offered, the answer would have to be "borderline" because the assumption is made by many that there is a single technique that will catapult sites to the top ten. That is simply not true and in most cases, concentrating on single techniques to the exclusion of all others is at best ineffective, and at worst considered sp*m.

The word I like to use instead of "borderline", is "incrementally important." Yes it can have a positive effect on ranking to include your keywords in the URL. But if you don't include those same keywords in your title tags, description tags, alt text, headline, body text and text hyperlinks - you are just diddling with ingredients instead of cooking a meal.

If you don't have worthwhile *internal links* connecting important related pages, you have forgotten to turn on the oven. If you don't cook each page individually and instead apply the same recipe to every meal (page), you are eating the same dish every meal. If you don't have inbound links from external sites, you'll be eating alone.

Variety is the spice of life. Don't get stuck at the fast food joints (single tactic SEO) unless you want to spend all your money on happy meals (Pay-Per-Click).

Mike Banks Valentine

realityseo.com

Written by Ian Smith
March 16, 2006

> If anyone knows how to change the wording

> in the URL without losing the incoming links,

> then I would be really happy!

- Magnus Brättemark

Google and Yahoo both support 301 redirects for links. This is also a browser compatible solution. It basically works by sending a message in the header that says that the document at xxx.com/oldurl has permanently moved to xxx.com/newurl. Google and Yahoo will treat the links to the old url as links really going to the new url. Users will be redirected before they can tell the difference.

On a side note, you can use 301s to make sure all links use the same subdomain for your server. This is a safeguard to make sure that links going to www.xxx.com/document and xxx.com/document are counted as going to the same document and don't appear as duplicates in the search engines. It is generally suggested that you route all traffic going to http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com.

There are lots of resources to help you use 301 redirects (at the scripting level, etc). A simple google search should get you what you need.

Ian Smith

Written by Tom Anson
March 16, 2006

Concerning Chris Oberst's question about the relative importance of names in URLs: I believe that Mike Banks Valentine's response has some real merit. However, it seems that the wisdom contained there may be a bit "diluted" by his assumption of what Chris was asking.

It sounds to me like Mike assumed that Chris was looking at URL names as a single-ingredient fix-all. That is not how I read the question. Possibly a better way to approach the question would be, "Given the many different aspects of SEO, and assuming that each is being addressed appropriately, how important is it -- within the total of SEO efforts -- to have the product name or description in the URL? Is it important, borderline (or incrementally important) or not important?"

When I was getting started on the web, the heavy use of keywords in file names was stressed as an important way to get good rankings in the SERPs (as were alt tag-stuffing and title attritubes). However, I found that things improved for me once I *removed* all the extra stuffing (although my numbers have not been sufficient to define any really unambiguous trends). When I changed my page names from something like ~/singles/marjoram-essential-oil.html or ~/blends/valor-aromatherapy-blend.html to the more simple ~/marjoram.html or ~/valor.html, it didn't seem to make any difference in traffic.

But it seems to make sense that naming a page for lavender oil something like ~/products/singles/lavender.html would be a better choice than a string of gibberish. At least site visitors know where they are (if they bother to look at the URL) and can tell that there is some real site structure in mind.

That said, I'd like to pose Chris's question to Mike and others again, "Within the full mix of SEO practices (at least the good ones), and understanding that there is no single technique that will catapult my site to the top ten, how important is the product name / keyword in the URL? Assuming I don't have a lot of incoming links to these product pages, would the file name make enough difference to warrant making the changes? Or would the benefit be low enough that it wouldn't be worth the trouble? In a numbered list of things to look at for SEO, would the file name even make the top 10?"

Tom Anson

Anson Aromatic Essentials

Written by Shari Thurow
March 20, 2006

Hi all-

This is in response to Magnus Brättemark's post in LED #2117 regarding keywords in the domain and file names. I hope I can share my knowledge on this topic, though it is a bit technical in nature.

Let's just use Google as an example. Suppose you type a keyword phrase into Google (such as help desk software) and click the Search button. In the search results, you will see the query words help, desk, and software presented as bold in search results. In the information retrieval industry, this is referred to as "term highlighting."

The reason that term highlighting is common in the information retrieval industry is, quite simply, usability. To make searchers feel more confident that they are viewing desired results, a software engineer has programmed it so that query words display somewhere in the search results. In Google, you can see that software engineers have decided to utilize term highlighting in title-tag content, snippets, and URLs (Web addresses).

Now, as someone who builds search interfaces, I know I can change term highlighting. I might only want to show term highlighting in the document's title and not show it in the description. I might not want to utilize term highlighting at all. Or I can really mess everything up and highlight terms that are not keywords.

Here's the problem: many SEO companies have staff with absolutely no technical background. Conclusions are based on misconceptions such as, "It's highlighted in the search results; therefore it's part of the algorithm." I admit, a long time ago, that was my initial hypothesis. As I became more educated and experienced in this arena (being back in graduate school for Information Sciences helps a lot), I realized how important the technical background really is.

Though technical skills certainly are not the be-all-that-ends-all in being an SEO expert. I know plenty of SEO techies that know how to cloak but have few SEO skills outside of that. I often shudder when I read their version of search-friendly, user-friendly copywriting.

Anyway, term highlighting has little or nothing to do with how any information retrieval system (including a Web search engine) determines relevancy. The only time that the URL is used for relevancy is if searchers are doing some type of URL query.

That being said, from a usability standpoint, it is true that if users see the term highlighted in the URL, it does make them more confident that the information they are seeking is available on the Web site. An overgeneralization, but at least it's in the right direction.

I hope I was able to communicate this well. If I didn't, just let me know. I'm more than happy to clarify.

Sincerely,

Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director

Grantastic Designs, Inc.

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