I have always been told that URLs have no impact in SEO. They just make url more readable. The spiders which crawl our sites, they don't care about URLs at all. All they is do is look at content. Am I correct ? lets say, I have a page which talks about apples & its name is 01.html instead of apples.html and another page about oranges as 02.html. And so on... So does affect my rankings of page in search engines ? many have suggested me to concentrate only on content & NOT to worry at all about url (and even domain name). I want to know is this correct information ? URLs does not affect rankings at all ? not even 1% ? If it is so, is there any official documentation from Google (or any search engine) about this ? Thank you in advance
Of course URL's and their construction (the way of) matter, you have been lied to or misinformed, so > https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en will be the document from Google you might find useful?
Yes, using keywords in your URL can affect SEO. It's less of a signal today than it used to be, but it's still a factor. Don't go overboard and create long, spammy URLs like "green-delicious-apples-from-washington-state-for-sale.html", but having something simple with the main topic is good, like "apples.html". Using topical keywords in your URLs is also good for users. It's easier to remember the URL and if the URL is the anchor text for a link, it's easier to know what the page is about. - Kurt Steinbrueck
Where do you get the info it is less of a signal now than it used to be? That is not true at all IMHO as clean (and cleanly worded descriptive) URL's have always been important and hyphenated URL's are preferred now as much, if not more than ever b4 these days. And as for what you call a spammy URL although not the best choice of word string to demonstrate a long tail string perhaps (though why in reality not it's fine really) like you wrote ""green-delicious-apples-from-washington-state-for-sale.html" is not spammy by any means! How is that so, if that is what is the target - what you are saying makes no sense. Allow me to demonstrate a long tail as you would call spammy URL by Moz > http://moz.com/blog/how-should-marketers-react-when-googles-search-results-have-dramatic-changes That's quite some length don't you think? 2 more words than your example Sir! Or are you implying it is the choice of words and not just the length? I expect you will say that is so, yes? Now what you have stated as a spammy URL is a perfectly respectable keyword rich URL string which you saying is not so is misleading and likely to be detrimental to a persons efforts to be thinking it is so. It is not always the word count that can be seen in the SE index that matters also, which I have tried to point out in other threads only to be slammed for saying so. Sometimes it's nice to end visually for the index and at other times it's nice to coax the click by using longer strings to. A spammy URL would be much much longer. And it would quite likely contain many repititions to!
Revelations, You make a good point that length of a URL does not make a spammy URL. I was going off memory of an old Matt Cutts video where he was talking about avoiding long URLs like that and had thought it was in relation to spammy URLs. It's been a long time, though, so maybe he was talking more about usability. As for why I don't think it's as big a signal anymore, we have the recent algorithm updates focused on exact match domains (last December?) and the apparent change related to keyword inclusive domains in the last month or so. Granted, these updates focused more on domain names, than the full URL, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think that it also applies to the full URL. -Kurt
I think, if you form url's keyword rich then surely then will push your keywords rank well. So, making url's for a service or a product is always tricky.
Url plays a role in Ranking too. One should keep url as short and descriptive. See you are asking for an official document as i know Google itself talks there are 200 ranking factors but no one has at least 10 ranking factors so that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Google says very clearly that your links and site should be very clean so that spiders can easily crawl and get all of your inks indexed.