Comments on: Long URLs good for SEO?

By: Rosco

Rosco — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:14:59 +0000

Thanks for that,

Rosco

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:22:17 +0000

Hi Rosco,
Either 1 or 2 will work. 2 may be marginally better but this is probably not a major signal for indexing and ranking. The fact that the base url and topic is about jobs is the main signal.
Logical organization is more important for the correct indexing and for visitors to navigate so plan out your urls to give a good structure now and for the future. There are more important on-page and off-page factors that you should focus on. Perhaps I will blog about some of those shortly.

Using a plus sign is not something I have tried. I can’t imagine it is any better than a hyphen. The point here is that getting too long with urls creates some problems.

By: Rosco

Rosco — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:06:17 +0000

Hi Barry,

With a website like jobs.com do you think its better for SEO purposes with google, to name the url for a page about “mining jobs” like.

1) jobs.com/mining.html OR 2) jobs.com/mining-jobs.html ??

Second question is I have seen an SEO/website firm start to use the plus sign (+) in between keywords in the url path than the usual (-)

For example
jobs.com/mining+jobs.html

Do you know if using + is better? The only reason I can think of them using this is that if you do a search on google, their url includes the + sign in between the keyword phase you are searching for.

Rosco

By: Jamey

Jamey — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:33:43 +0000

I am big fan of well-named urls and I tend to keep them to three words. In fact, I came upon this blog because I was searching for an article I once read that promoted keeping urls to two hyphens.

By: PhilGus

PhilGus — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 21:57:17 +0000

I believe that the SEO optimal custom structure for title tags is “/%category%/%postname%/%tags%/” (change in ‘settings-permalinks’ of Worpress). This is long, but SEs like it.

By: Barry

Barry — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:43:22 +0000

Hi Doe-mainer,
I think I may have been unclear. The URLs we are referring to are the ones on posts and pages, not the domain name itself.
So for this page: //www.predictivedomaining.com/2009/02/20/seo-urls/
as opposed to something like //www.predictivedomaining.com/2009/02/20/Long-URLs-good-for-SEO/

Domain name length is a whole other story. There I agree with what you said.

By: Doe-mainer

Doe-mainer — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:21:31 +0000

I agree with much of the above. We are seeing longer URLs because the shorter ones are already taken. However, it is true that short, sweet, and to the point URLs are the best. I always evaluate the length of the domain name, but it is also important if the domain name is keyword centric and speaks to a specific niche market.

By: Domain Development Articles

Domain Development Articles — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 20:01:55 +0000

@Domain Superstar

Thanks for the tip, but we prefer to do it ourselves. You’ll want to pepper and customise those URLs in ways that a plugin just can’t do it.

- Richard

By: wanna develop

wanna develop — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:14:55 +0000

Google lies. Not the first time, won’t be the last time.

Go with what you know works, don’t listen to what anybody else says or doesn’t say.

Trust what you see with your own two eyes.

All the best,

Mike

PS– having the keywords within the url does help.

By: Domain Superstar

Domain Superstar — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:09:09 +0000

Richard,

You may want to try out the “SEO Slugs” plugin (if you are using WordPress):

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/

- Joel

http://www.DomainSuperstar.com