Articles are organised by date. Typically, there will be a new one as and when I have the time and find a subject to talk about.

SEO Friendly URLs - Fact or Fiction

SEO Friendly URLs - Fact or Fiction?

I'm very interested in natural SEO, and try to keep myself up-to-date with new techniques and methods to improve my understanding of the subject. One particular area of this topic that has always been a bugbear for me is the matter of SEO-friendly URLs. The problem I have with this part of the field is that many people like to re-iterate how important it is, but without giving any real evidence as to why it is so. Much like many of the myths listed on snopes.com, some things are just repeated down the chain until the truth is too heavily diluted in the murky waters of rumour.

What Exactly is a Search Engine Friendly URL?

Basically, a URL that is deemed SEO "friendly", is one that has no query portion to it (that is, no '?' character followed by a string of gobbledegook). Now, a lot of the time, CMSs and forums use these types of URLs all the time to allow one central control script to process the output for all of the content of your website. Now, this is where the debate becomes confusing, because I've seen plenty of websites rank favourably for a wide variety of search terms use just this type of dynamic URL format. In-fact, pretty much every forum I've ever been on utilises these sorts of URLs, and I tend to find the forums via a web search for the answer to a problem.

Why Are Dynamic URLs Bad?

The best answer I can find for this goes back to very early search engines, a long time before the likes of Google. Now, search engines back then were pretty basic. They indexed your website based soley on what keywords you had in your <meta> tags, and quite often ignored the query portion of a URL. Now, these were very simple search engines, and very open to abuse, but people realised that relying on dynamic URLs sometimes meant failing to be listed on these search engines.

Move on to the present day and you'll notice that search engines are a world away from their previous incarnations. Now, such outdated things as <meta> tags are largely ignored, and URLs are indexed as the W3C intended. However, it seems that people are slower to adapt, and hold on to the old SEO practices as firmly as a Terrier.

So, in short, dynamic URLs are absolutely fine.

The Case for SEO Friendly URLs

So is there a good reason to use friendlier URLs? Of course, although they probably won't have much of an impact on search engines. In-fact, even Matt Cutts of Google acknowledges that SEO-friendly URLs only helps a small amount.

The best argument for more friendly URLs is their human readability aspect. People tend to prefer shorter URLs, and ones that can be recalled and typed in easily. The YouTube link of Matt Cutts above is a prime example of a URL that people would find it nigh on impossible to remember at a later date.

A Final Experiment

In order to see just how the URL can affect search engine indexing, this article will be listed with a dynamic URL portion containing a keyword not found on this page, but on others on this website. If this page shows up in a site-based search, then it's position compared to the other pages which contain the keyword as text will be used as a rough gauge of the importance of SEO URLs. While not a great scientific example, it should help get an idea of any further tests that could be done in this area. I'll check periodically on different search engines to check when the page has been listed, but I'd hazard a guess that it won't be for about 2 weeks.