1: Whenever possible, use a
single domain & subdomain
It's hard to argue this given the
preponderance of evidence and examples of folks moving their content from a
subdomain to subfolder and seeing improved results (or, worse, moving
content to a subdomain and losing traffic). Whatever heuristics the
engines use to judge whether content should inherit the ranking ability of its
parent domain seem to have trouble consistently passing to subdomains.
That's not to say it can't work,
and if a subdomain is the only way you can set up a blog or produce the content
you need, then it's better than nothing. But your blog is far more likely to
perform well in the rankings and to help the rest of your site's content
perform well if it's all together on one sub and root domain.
2: The more readable
by human beings, the better
It should come as no surprise that
the easier a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search
engines. Accessibility has always been a part of SEO, but never more so than
today, when engines can leverage advanced user and usage data signals to
determine what people are engaging with vs. not.
3: Keywords in URLs:
still a good thing
It's still the case that using the
keywords you're targeting for rankings in your URLs is a solid idea. This is
true for several reasons.
First, keywords in the URL help
indicate to those who see your URL on social media, in an email, or as they
hover on a link to click that they're getting what they want and expect.
Second, URLs get copied and
pasted regularly, and when there's no anchor text used in a link, the URL
itself serves as that anchor text (which is still a powerful input for
rankings).
Third, and finally, keywords in the
URL show up in search results, and research
has shown that the URL is one of the most prominent elements searchers
consider when selecting which site to click.
4: Multiple URLs serving
the same content? Canonicalize 'em!
If you have two URLs that serve
very similar content, consider canonicalizing them, using either a 301 redirect
(if there's no real reason to maintain the duplicate) or a rel=canonical (if
you want to maintain slightly different versions for some visitors, e.g. a
printer-friendly page).
Duplicate content isn't really a
search engine penalty (at least, not until/unless you start duplicating at very
large scales), but it can cause a split of ranking signals that can harm your
search traffic potential. If Page A has some quantity of ranking ability and
its duplicate, Page A2, has a similar quantity of ranking ability, by
canonicalizing them, Page A can have a better chance to rank and earn visits.
5: Exclude dynamic
parameters when possible
This kind of junk is ugly:
If you can avoid using URL
parameters, do so. If you have more than two URL parameters, it's probably
worth making a serious investment to rewrite them as static, readable, text.
Some dynamic parameters are used
for tracking clicks (like those inserted by popular social sharing apps such as
Buffer). In general, these don't cause a huge problem, but they may make for
somewhat unsightly and awkwardly long URLs. Use your own judgement around
whether the tracking parameter benefits outweigh the negatives.
6: Shorter >
longer
Shorter URLs are, generally
speaking, preferable. You don't need to take this to the extreme, and if your
URL is already less than 50-60 characters, don't worry about it at all. But if
you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to
rewrite them and gain value.
This isn't a direct problem with
Google or Bing—the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble.
The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience. Shorter URLs are
easier to parse, to copy and paste, to share on social media, and to embed, and
while these might all add up to only a fractional improvement in sharing or
amplification, every tweet, like, share, pin, email,
and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly).
7: Match URLs to titles
most of the time (when it makes sense)
This doesn't mean that if the title
of your piece is "My Favorite 7 Bottles of Islay Whisky (and how one of
them cost me my entire Lego collection)" that your URL has to be a
perfect match. Something like
randswhisky.com/my-favorite-7-islay-whiskies
would be just fine. So, too would
randswhisky.com/blog/favorite-7-bottles-islay-whisky
or variations on these. The
matching accomplishes a mostly human-centric goal, i.e. to imbue an excellent
sense of what the web user will find on the page through the URL and then to deliver
on that expectation with the headline/title.
We should aim for a similar level
of clarity in our own URLs and titles.
8: Including
stop words isn't necessary
If your title/headline includes
stop words (and, or, but, of, the, a, etc.), it's not critical to put
them in the URL. You don't have to leave them out, either, but it can sometimes
help to make a URL shorter and more readable in some sharing contexts. Use your
best judgement on whether to include or not based on the readability vs.
length.
You can see in the URL of this
particular post you're now reading, for example, that I've chosen to leave in
"for" because I think it's easier to read with the stop word
than without, and it doesn't extend the URL length too far.
9: Remove/control for
unwieldy punctuation characters
It's not merely the poor
readability these characters might cause, but also the potential for breaking
certain browsers, crawlers, or proper parsing.
10: Limit redirection hops
to two or fewer
If a user or crawler requests URL
A, which redirects to URL B. That's cool. It's even OK if URL B then redirects
to URL C (not great—it would be more ideal to point URL A directly to URL C,
but not terrible). However, if the URL redirect string continues past two hops,
you could get into trouble.
Generally speaking, search engines
will follow these longer redirect jumps, but they've recommended against the
practice in the past, and for less "important" URLs (in their eyes),
they may not follow or count the ranking signals of the redirecting URLs as completely.
The bigger trouble is browsers and
users, who are both slowed down and sometimes even stymied (mobile browsers in
particular can occasionally struggle with this) by longer redirect strings.
Keep redirects to a minimum and you'll set yourself up for less problems.
11: Fewer folders is generally
better
Take a URL like this:
randswhisky.com/scotch/lagavulin/15yr/distillers-edition/pedro-ximenez-cask/750ml
And consider, instead, structuring
it like this:
randswhisky.com/scotch/lagavulin-distillers-edition-750ml
It's not that the slashes (aka
folders) will necessarily harm performance, but it can create a perception of
site depth for both engines and users, as well as making edits to the URL
string considerably more complex (at least, in most CMS' protocols).
There's no hard and fast
requirement—this is another one where it's important to use your best
judgement.
12: Avoid hashes in URLs
that create separate/unique content
The hash (or URL fragment
identifier) has historically been a way to send a visitor to a specific
location on a given page (e.g. Moz's blog posts use the hash to navigate you to
a particular comment, like
this
one from my wife). Hashes can also be used like tracking parameters (e.g.
randswhisky.com/lagavulin#src=twitter). Using URL hashes for something
other than these, such as showing unique content than what's available on the
page without the hash or wholly separate pages is generally a bad idea.
There are exceptions, like those
Google
enables
for developers seeking to use the hashbang format for dynamic AJAX
applications, but even these aren't nearly as clean, visitor-friendly, or
simple from an SEO perspective as statically rewritten URLs. Sites from
Amazon to Twitter have found tremendous benefit in simplifying their previously
complex and hash/hashbang-employing URLs. If you can avoid it, do.
13: Be wary of case
sensitivity
A couple years back, John Sherrod
of Search Discovery
wrote
an excellent piece noting the challenges and issues around case-sensitivity
in URLs. Long story short—if you're using Microsoft/IIS servers, you're
generally in the clear. If you're hosting with Linux/UNIX, you can get into
trouble as they can interpret separate cases, and thus randswhisky.com/AbC
could be a different piece of content from randswhisky.com/aBc. That's bad
biscuits
In an ideal world, you want URLs
that use the wrong case to automatically redirect/canonicalize to the right
one. There are htaccess rewrite protocols to assist (
like
this one)—highly recommended if you're facing this problem.
14: Hyphens and
underscores are preferred word separators
Notably missing (for the first time
in my many years updating this piece) is my recommendation to avoid underscores
as word separators in URLs. In the last few years, the search engines have
successfully overcome their previous challenges with this issue and now treat
underscores and hyphens similarly.
Spaces can work, but they render
awkwardly in URLs as %20, which detracts from the readability of your pages.
Try to avoid them if possible (it's usually pretty easy in a modern CMS).
15: Keyword stuffing and
repetition are pointless and make your site look spammy
Check out the search result listing
below, and you'll see a whole lot of "canoe puppies" in the URL.
That's probably not ideal, and it could drive some searchers to bias against
wanting to click.
Repetition like this doesn't help
your search rankings—Google and Bing have moved far beyond algorithms that
positively reward a keyword appearing multiple times in the URL string. Don't
hurt your chances of earning a click (which CAN impact your rankings) by
overdoing keyword matching/repetition in your URLs.
Details Here : The Moz Blog
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