How important are seo freindly urls for a dynamic site

Hi Guys,

I am confused about the weightage of seo freindly urls over cid,pid urls of a dynamic site.

Are seo friendly urls a must for having ranked on first page for competitive keywords?

I had analysed some very competitive keywords and my results says that there is very less probability of a dynamic url (url containing cid pid)to be on first page.
All the search results shown for competive keywords have very seo freindly urls for all 2 pages and dynamic urls start to appear either after first 15 or after first 20 sites.

Please do an analysis taking some competitive keywords in acoount and let me know if you observe the same pattern.

 

I generate SEO-friendly URL's for all the dynamic content on my site, but as this was in place when I launched, I can't give you a comparison of whether it improved the SERP results or not.

Are the words within URL's considered when ranking SERPs or just the code and content of the pages themselves?

 

if you want good rankings....you need them

 

Hi CurryMan

yes if you have keywords in your urls , the urls support your rankings in search engines.
May i have the url of your site so that i can have a look.

 

No, URL's are not playing a BIG role in SEO.

SERP's are based on Contents, Backlinks, Domain age and many factors.

 

no, Dear
Do you have any proof about it?
Keywords Play very important role whenever they will come in url.

 

I agree with Rakson.
Some urls rank on first page with competitive keywords, if they have very neat url for an internal page. If we look for their backward links or pr, they do not stand out in these factors. I have seen page with 0 pr and 2 or 3 backlinks on first page.

 

Kutekutta

My analysis says YES Url plays important role in rankings now.

 

Kutekutta

Do asearch for "hotels in gardena" I have taken this keyword from your signature. The keyword is competitive with 1,170,000 competitors. And the first CID pId url you will encounter is in 19th position.

 

My best ranking, pr having, with sitelinks, highest traffic website doesn't have se friendly urls.

Its my only website without se friendly urls.

 

Can I have the url of your website and keywords for which it is on first page

 

Hi,
I had analyzed that some URLs rank on first page with competitive keywords, if they have very neat URL for an internal page. If we look for their backward links or PR, they do not stand out in these factors. I have seen page with 0 PR and 2 or 3 back links on first page.

 

SEO-friendly are in my opinion the most important part of SEO, period.

 

Id prefer not to, but it ranks for a number of very relevant keywords and phrases.

Not just first page, first and second positions for the keywords, my main competitors site is years older than mine, its down to promotion i feel.

 

Keyword rich URLs play a minor role in the ranking algorithm compared to a lot of the other on and off-page factors. But they do help! We all know, it's typically not one optimization technique that you apply to a page at a particular URL that makes that URL rank well. It's typically the sum of lots of little optimizations that make you rank well. This is just another tool in your bag of tricks...

SEO friendly URLs are definitely not 'required' to rank on page 1. Until we redesigned our entire site in Dec 08 and eliminated all query string parameters, we had many URLs ranking on page 1 w/ several query string parameters in each of those URLs. And we are in one of the top 3 competitive verticals on the web.


But having nice clean SEO friendly URLs will help you in a several ways:

- Some less sophisticated search engines will truncate your URL after the 1st, 2nd, 3rd query string parameter which can cause URL naming collisions because multiple URLs will appear to be the same URL once they are truncated. This will reduce the number of URLs you get indexed and a particular truncated URL (because it represents multiple pages) will have it's content constantly changing depending on which of the 'real' URLs was indexed and truncated last.

- Having keywords in the URL does add a tiny boost to rankings, at least at Google. It does not have near the affect as modifying your <title>, <h1>, <h2>, ... elements, but it helps. It's more of a fine tuning lever for optimization.

- URLs w/ querystring parameters are just plain ugly when they appear in the SERPs. And when a searcher at Google sees them in the SERPs, IMO they are less likely to click on the URL w/ all of the query string parameters and more likely to click on an organic listing with an SEO friendly URL containing the search phrase or other keywords closely related to the search phrase. So IMO using SEO friendly URLs increases click-thru-rate.

- Eliminates the chance for canonical issues which, of course, leads to duplicate content issues and split page rank. For example, http://www.example.com/?cid=123&pid=456 and http://www.example.com/?pid=456&cid=123 on MOST sites will render the exact same content since most sites don't enforce rules that the query string parameters have to appear in a certain order - you just need a cid and pid in the query string somewhere. But to the search engines, these are 2 different URLs. Bam! Duplicate content. And if 10 sites link to http://www.example.com/?cid=123&pid=456 and 10 different sites link to http://www.example.com/?pid=456&cid=123 then the search engines see this as 2 pages each w/ 10 inbound links even though you are rendering the same page. Using a single SEO friend url like http://www.example.com/categoryname-productname/ would cause the search engines to see it as a single page w/ 20 inbound links. This boosts your page's PR AND helps it to rank better since the inbound link text from the 20 links is focused on one URL, not spread out over 2.


Query string parameters in general are TERRIBLE for SEO. Even though you may be careful to insure that the cid always appears before the pid in the query string, the next developer may not know that this is important and start introducing the canonical issues above.

When we redesigned the site, we eliminated ALL use of query string parameters on our own pages and went to keyword rich URLs. Now our site is covered w/ nice clean links... We got a huge instant boost to rankings and PR site-wide by doing this.

Even after going to keyword rich URLs, we still use query strings for tracking where external traffic comes from (affiliate IDs, tracking IDs for different Google Adwords, tracking IDs for Yahoo! home page display ads, tracking IDs for CPM ads, etc.). Now I needed a way to deal w/ external sites linking to us w/ query string parameters.

I had our developers write code (an HTTP Module - we're an IIS shop) that processes every page request on our web server before any page ever has a chance of being rendered. We have an XML file that lists the name of all of our known tracking query string parameters and a bunch of other data about how to process them (cookie name, cookie expiration period, etc).

When a page request comes in, this HTTP Module checks to see if there is a query string. If so then in goes through the cached XML of known tracking codes. As it finds tracking codes, it cookies them in a cookie with the corresponding name and expiration period from the tracking code XML, strips them from the URL, and sets a flag that the URL has changed. After it has looked for and and removed all tracking codes, if the URL has changed due to stripping then it 301 redirects to the nice clean URLs. If the traffic converts then we log the conversion with the external source by pulling the affiliate code or whatever out of the cookies instead of getting it from the URL as we had previously.

By eliminating all query strings on the site and cooking/stripping/redirecting to clean URLs for external traffic w/ query strings, we got a HUGE boost in both PR and rankings.

I would seriously consider going w/ SEO friendly URLs if you can afford to do the work. It generally is worth it.

 

I have bought a domain name last year and I choose mykeyword.com (yes I was lucky enough that it wasn't taken)

I only submitted this site to the major search engines and have done NO other SEO or link building.

Well guess what, after a few months, I now rank 3rd position for that keyword... for the only reason that the keyword is in the URL.

I have witnessed many similar cases... trust me, your keyword in your domain name/URL is a major plus.

 

Dear Canonical

My greatest thanks to you for such a detailed explanations.
I had gone through each of your explained point. I would like to have your opinion regarding the urls of my website.

Hope you could take out some time for this.

 

Hi Thanks for your reply.

But here actually we are talking about seo freindly urls over cid pid urls, and not the keywords in domain name.

Your view regarding seo freindly urls will be much appreciated.

Sincerely,

 

Well its one of the factor which helps in SERP's

Its simple , Search engine can read the urls and add some weightage in calculation of SERP's

I am not saying that they are put too high weightage or credibility

But definately they are part of factors which count for SERP's so you can't say it doesnt add values, they are important ofcourse

 

I see results from youtube on the first position many times yet youtube links are dynamic and don't have any keywords in them Maybe because it is an authority site ?