Sep

Search Engines friendly URL Structure

Anshu Garg on September 24th, 2008

It is really important to make the site structure as simple as possible to make it search engine & user friendly. Content should be organized logically with proper hierarchy. When we are talking of site structure & content management, we should not close our eyes to URLs of the web pages. URLs should be constructed with readable words without so many session IDs, so that human eyes & search engines can read them easily & can also get the idea of the hierarchy of the web pages. For example, if you’re searching for information about Pomeranian Dogs, a URL like http://example.com/dogs/pomeranian will help you decide whether to click that link. A URL like http://www.example.com/index.php?id_bread=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1 is much less appealing to users. Also, search engines are not comfortable with long dynamic URLs with lots of session IDs.

Consider using punctuation in your URLs.

The URL http://www.example.com/general-science.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/ generalscience.html. It is always advisable to use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in URLs.

Excessively complex URLs, with multiple parameters or too many session IDs, can cause a problems for SE crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site. As a result, SE crawling software may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all the content on your site.

Also long dynamic and complex URLs are difficult to repeat or remember and did not provide any clues for average users as to what a particular resource actually contains. SE’s like Google indexes dynamically generated webpages, including .asp pages, .php pages, and pages with question marks in their URLs. However, these pages can cause problems for SE crawler and may be ignored.

Some best practices to make URLs Search Engine Friendly

As said above, don not make the URLs too long & make them static with technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft. (Note: If you do this, please be sure to include a robots.txt file that disallows the dynamic pages in order to ensure that these pages aren’t seen as having duplicate content.) SE friendly URL is really a important factor of crawling & ranking of the web page. This is also good from other SEO point of view like in case of link building process many directories does not allow very long & dynamic URLs. Also, when people naturally put links then they always give consideration to the URL structure.

Wherever possible, try to avoid the use of session IDs in URLs. Consider using cookies instead. Try to shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters.

Try to use relevant keyword If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase (But please don’t try to do spamming with this).

Consider using a robots.txt file to block SE’s access to problematic URLs. We should consider blocking dynamic URLs, such as URLs that generate search results, or URLs that can create infinite spaces etc.

Don’t try to make URL’s case sensitive as they can accept both uppercase and lowercase characters.

Last but not the least, you should create & submit a detailed Sitemap with all important URLs of the site. This is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the SE index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages.

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