How beneficial are Friendly URL's?

#1 oakleaves

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Posted 11 November 2011 - 11:08 AM

So, you have your site and the URL's are looking like this:-

eg: yoursite.co.uk/product.php?id_product=1

So with your .htaccess file you set things so that they look like this:-

yoursite.co.uk/nice-friendly-url

I know this is better for Search Engine Optimisation, but I was wondering if any SEO guys could quantify this?

#2 daveb

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Posted 11 November 2011 - 11:35 AM

SEO friendly URLs are important not purely for the benefit of search engines.

Compare as an example...

yoursite.co.uk/samsung-tv

with

yoursite.co.uk/products/productinfo.php?id=1023223b

Which URL are real people most likely to be able to relay to others, imagine telling someone via telephone to go the link. The former wins everytime, be it telephone, or typing in an email, writing on a note to hand over to someone.

Also to a user, when they see the former, its immediately obvious what they can expect when they click on the link.

So my point is seo friendly URLs are people friendly as well as search engine friendly

Search Engines DO take into consideration the keywords used in a URL, it gives a strong signal what the content will relate to.

However, (there's always a however..)

Having a URL like

yoursite.co.uk/this-is-the-very-best-tv-on-the-market-dont-look-anywhere-else-and-buy-it-now

Will more than likely fire off spam signals with the search engines so keeping them short and to the point is also key.

This post has been edited by daveb: 11 November 2011 - 11:36 AM

#3 oakleaves

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Posted 11 November 2011 - 11:43 AM

^ makes sense

#4 rallport

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Posted 11 November 2011 - 02:20 PM

Not sure why you would choose not to use them. They are pretty much the standard nowadays and considered to have a positive impact.

#5 rallport

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Posted 21 December 2011 - 05:25 PM

Recently I was looking back at a very old asp site I did - roughly 5 years ago. News urls had the following format: news.asp?id=123&Title=News+Title+Here

When I made the site, Google was indexing these urls fine. But I looked last week and they are no where to be seen now.

#6 mOxby Design

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Posted 31 December 2011 - 10:02 AM

Have you checked in Google WMT or robots.txt that you're not excluding certain query strings? There's nothing innately wrong with your URL construction and still has keywords in it so is helpful for search and humans. So check

1. WMT
2. Robots.txt
3. Also check the links between the pages are fine and followed
4. Sitemap.xml? Are they in there?
5. Finally - make sure you haven't canonicalled incorrectly such to remove URLs accidentally from search.

Hope this helps.