Search engines care about URL keywords... or do they?

HB · phpBB SEO Team Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 808

It's been about six months that I'm working on my site's SEO, sifting through articles and hints about what is worth doing and what isn't. Team phpBB SEO, it's great to see a forum dedicated to the topic!

One reason I've resisted going through the trouble of URL rewriting is because I've read varying opinions about its value. What sort of "proof" is there (if such a thing could exist) that search engines care about the URL form? Google's webmaster documentation says that one or two ? parameters are fine, but not much else.

As I mentioned in More readable URLs for advanced MOD rewrite, I'm as much interested in the topic nowadays for the human readable value of the URLs as the search engine friendliness. It would certainly be a welcome benefit if both audiences appreciated the difference.

Related question: Do search engines really care about the .html suffix? Suffixes have all but disappeared from major sites. Why are they included in the phpBB mod rewrite?

dcz

Many things are said about url rewriting and SEO, all sort of things.
To me it's just obvious Rewritten URLs are better spidered and indexed and that they do transmit PageRank better.

For sure this does not mean natural php URLs won't be Ranked and spidered, but it will just be slower.

Actually, this web site is full of examples. Several members arrived here with a rather big forum, with PR over three on index, and almost no URL listed in Google, and after a month or so, ended with many thousands of URLs listed in Google's results, which is SEO step one.

Then, if we inject keywords in our URLs, it's even better, especially if the keyword(s) is well related to the page's content.

Now this being said, what is obvious is SEO is only optimization, you need something to optimize on, which here is content.

About the URL standard, and the .html suffix my first concern was simplicity and efficiency.
If you start to ad many elaborated filters in the format_url function as you started, it will be more work for the server for not this much.
IMHO, the ones to really care about URLs standard are bots and webmasters, users usually just do not care about them, but rather about the content and the page loading time.
SEO wise, filtering some small words could be efficient, but going to far would just be time waisted IMHO, as titles themselves can already be moderated, and bad ones should anyway.

About the suffix, the new mod rewrite will allow for every one to choose it, very easily, people will be able to use "/" instead of ".html" if they prefer.

I don't think using "/" would be this much of an optimization, can shorten the url a bit, which is good, but not much more.

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HB · phpBB SEO Team Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 808

HB · phpBB SEO Team Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 808

dcz

For tracking, please post a report, we'll be able to acurately track the changes.

what should occur is the following :

First, the new URL needs to be updated in search engines index. This is quite fast with Google, as shown by our experience, and should occur without any change at first in brought visitors and SERPs.
Second, duplicate reduction. As you have disallowed the post urls, you should not see the number of listed ulr going down, but rather stay the same. But still, you'll reduce all pagination dupelicates and this helps.
The title optimisation will as well allow the pagination indexing
Less dupe and more pages listed (pagination) = better SERPs thus more visitors.
Then, the weigth added on keywords in URLs will do it's job, most of your pages should go up in SERPs and you should end up seeing more visitors brought to you web site by SEs. But this is a bit longer, the first data center update should be nice in PageRank transmission and SERP

As well, some search queries you did not think of at first will start bringing more visitors and adsense will be better targeted faster, as the keywords will add new keywords associations for Searche Engines.

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