I opened a can of something with the url optimization post. It appears I called out a few examples that look a little too familiar to a few of our client friends.
Okay, first of all, if you’re a client, you’re supposed to be subscribed to the laced version of my feed (no link because I just made it up). If the Kool Aid version did exist though, the post would have gone like this:
Your SEO friends are correct, there is potential Google love to be gained by adding human readable, hyphenated phrases to url strings, and we subscribe to the practice where applicable.
I am not grumpy about this topic.
I would have closed it off with a story of triumph that all would have found uplifting.
Instead I wrote a post that calls into question a practice we’ve rolled into our everyday thing: url optimization. So here is my position, restated: human-readable URLs are good. My only caveats:
- hyphenated phrases aren’t always better than single keywords in URLs
- not all pages benefit enough from URL optimization to be worth the effort of renaming
- taken too far, URL rewriting will make links harder to remember / type / email
- URLs won’t mod_rewrite themselves - it takes a little extra effort to optimize generated pages
How’s that? Can we hug it out?
I’ve always thought underscores were more readable than dashes. I was glad to hear the big G will be treating them same as dashes.
Yeah, me too. I use underscores in my default filenaming convention. It feels funny to treat html differently. Not sure I’ll change, though, and I think the verdict is still out on that move. Funny you mention that - I’m posting about it right now.
I know some time back, Deane and I hashed this out in detail. I agree that URLs give benefit to ranking to a point, but Deane can send you hundreds of posts from Gadgetopia with top placements on Google SERPs and his string is /post/#### - nothing stuffed there. I still give it a 5% weight in overall organic results…if nothing else, it is like metatags - we just make em short, basic, yet exact.
Are you saying relevant content is more important than SEO hacks? I thought I was the only one who said things like that.
We’ve been getting pressed a lot on this lately, though. Much adieu about 5%.
[…] month, I dropped a few posts about url optimization. The reason for three posts was simple - I couldn’t get it out of my […]