I've been reading allot about webmasters who are now removing the keywords slugs from their URLS, and I'm just curious if anyone here has noticed an increase in traffic or SEO from doing so. If you maintain a wordpress blog, there is a new plugin that will do this for you. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/ If you're unfamiliar with SEO slugs here is a quick run down. The SEO Slugs WordPress plugin removes common words like 'a', 'the', 'in' from post slugs to improve search engine optimization. For example, when you publish a post with a title like this: "What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings", WordPress automatically assigns a long filename to your post, called a post slug: /what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings SEO Slugs plugin strips common words like "what", "you" or "can" out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plugin activated, the slug for our example blog post would look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings The slug is generated on saving a post (so you get a chance to look at it before publishing, and change it), or on publish. It won't overwrite an existing slug. You can force a new slug generation by deleting the existing one.
Interesting. It makes the URL shorter, so useful for twitter and stuff. I know my blogger blogs just use the entire title with dashes on whatever title I make it.
It's a free plugin, and it actually works quite well! Since Google already ignores these slugs in their algorithm, I guess the only use is for shorter urls.