URLs and SEO
February 2, 2009 · Chris Peters
One of the biggest mess-ups for web designers is the design and maintenance of URLs. Poor planning and design of your site's URLs can lead to some missed opportunities for SEO over the long-haul.
One of the biggest mess-ups for web designers is the design and maintenance of URLs. Poor planning and design of your site’s URLs can lead to some missed opportunities for search engine optimization (SEO) over the long-haul.
Human-friendly URLs
Search engines value URLs that are friendly to humans as well. They encourage URLs that could be spoken over the phone to someone or could be shared in an email without needing to span several lines.
Take this ridiculous URL, for example. It really is worthy of the ridicule that it received on the Late Show.
If you have URLs like this on your site, then you’re using a technology produced by a provider that just doesn’t “get” how the Web should work.
Hyphens as word delimiters
Long ago, Google’s own Matt Cutts revealed that Google officially recognizes hyphens as word delimiters in URLs. If you are using underscores between words instead, then Google is treating separate words in your URLs as all the same word, all smooshed together.
From a user experience standpoint, using hyphens in URLs makes sense as well. If your URLs get published as links in documents and on other webpages (which happens often), then underscores are hard to read in the context of an underlined text link.
Look at this URL, for example. Having trouble seeing the underscores because of the underline?
Cool URLs never change
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote an informative article about the design of URLs. He argues that if your site’s URLs are designed thoughtfully up front, then you should never need to change them. He gives several examples of how you could accomplish that goal. Give it a read and pass it along to your web designer.
What to do if your URLs do need to change
You will get to a point where you redesign your website, and this may require some URL changes along with it. Or maybe you’ve broken some of Berners-Lee’s guidelines like exposing your web technology through your URLs. (Like technology never changes. Right…)
What do you do when you need to make your changes? Well, you have 2 options: 301 redirects and 404 not found pages.
301 redirects
Sorry for the jargon, but 301 is the code in the Web world for a permanently-moved URL. Along with a 301 code, your web server tells the visitor where the page has moved.
A web browser like Internet Explorer sees the code and new location and automatically loads the new URL. This is great for a user who has an old URL bookmarked or who stumbles across a page on another site that links to one of your old URLs.
A search engine also does something very practical with a 301 redirect code. It takes these actions:
- Indexes the content at the new URL
- Removes the old URL from its index
- Assigns all “ranking power” of the old URL to the new URL
If you just delete the old URLs without doing 301 redirects to the new content, you are hurting your search rankings and potentially alienating users who have bookmarked your old URLs.
Don’t overdo it with 301 redirects
One thing to consider is that browsers ignore 301 redirect chains that are more than 5 items long. Sometimes you’ll have a URL that redirects to another URL, which then redirects to another URL. After a chain of 5 such redirects, the chain of redirects will stop working.
As a result, I recommend being very conservative about the use of 301 redirects. Only use them if you absolutely need to change your URLs. Trust me. Multiple redirects can start piling up after a while if you’re in an environment that requires a lot of change.
404 not found pages
404 errors are probably more familiar to you as a web surfer. 404 means that the page cannot be found. These errors are most appropriately used when your content doesn’t have a suitable replacement URL.
If you get rid of content and there is not reasonable place to redirect it to, then that is a good time to declare content bankruptcy and have the web server throw a 404 error. But only do this as a last resort. When was the last time that you can recall being happy about getting a “page not found” error?
URL design
As you can see, choosing URLs for your content is no trivial task. A URL seems like a simple part of the Web, but it is also one of the defining elements of the Web. It’s imporantant.
Putting some thought into the design and maintenance of your URLs can keep you ranking well in the search engines for years to come.
