Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How important are clean URLs?
-
Just wanting to understand the importance of clean URLs in regards to SEO effectiveness.
Currently, we have URLs for a site that reads as follows: http://www.interhampers.com.au/c/90/Corporate Gift Hampers
Should we look into modifying this so that the URL does not have % or figures?
-
What if you have a client with a LOT of ugly URLs that need to be cleaned up?
The plan is to create 301 redirects for every page that we change. But, let's say we're talking about 50+ product pages.
In your opinion, is it a problem to make that many changes at once?
Would you paste them out?
If so, how many at a time?
Also, is it a problem to have that many 301's on your website?Thank you!
-
Yes! As Suresh and Shakur said, that it is preferred by people and search engines. People have hard time reading the urls with special characters and a hyphen is recommended.
Regards
-
Hi there!
Clean URLs are preferred by people, and it just so happens that search engines prefer them as well. Keywords in URLs are, more often than not, used to identify the relevance of a page when a search for a particular keyword is performed. However, it is not generally recommended to stuff keywords in your URLs for SEO purposes. The idea is to deliver enhanced usability to help users remember and share your URLs more easily. At the same time, clean URLs also facilitate a search engine’s ability to identify the relevance of page content to a particular search query, in order to choose what to display in search results.
So yes, it´s better if you modify all of them and make it clean.
Good luck
-
Definitely you should look into modifying the url structure. % represents blank spaces in the url. You can replace the blank spaces with "-". Google recommends hyphenated url's rather than blank spaces and underscores. The url's should be clean with every word seperated by "-" and the url size can be anywhere around 80 to 90 characters in length.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Virtual URL Google not indexing?
Dear all, We have two URLs: The main URL which is crawled both by GSC and where Moz assigns our keywords is: https://andipaeditions.com/banksy/ The second one is called a virtual url by our developpers: https://andipaeditions.com/banksy/signedandunsignedprintsforsale/ This is currently not indexed by Google. We have been linking to the second URL and I am unable to see if this is passing juice/anything on to the main one /banksy/ Is it a canonical? The /banksy/ is the one that is being picked up in serps/by Moz and worry that the two similar URLs are splitting the signal. Should I redirect from the second to the first? Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | TAT1000 -
City Name in URL structure
I have a client whose site was built when they only served one market, and they now have that city in the majority of their URLs. I'm suggesting we redo the URL structure to remove this location from the main URLs (think homepage, about, etc.) since they have now expanded to three markets. They are seeing a lot of great organic traffic in that original market but are struggling in the new ones they've added so I'm helping to optimize their site. How critical do you think that removing that location from the URL is? I know we would need to implement 301 redirects, but wanted to get thoughts on this.
On-Page Optimization | | maghanlinchpinsales0 -
Link flow for multiple links to same URL
Hi there,
On-Page Optimization | | doctecs
my question is as follows: How does Google handle link flow if two links in a given page point to the same URL? (do they flow link individually or not?) This seems to be a newbie question, but actually it seems that there is little evidence and even also little consensus in the SEO community about this detail. Answers should include source Information about the current state of art at Google is preferable The question is not about anchor text, general best practises for linking, "PageRank is dead" etc. We do know that the "historical" PageRank was implemented (a long time ago) without special handling for multiple links, as e.g. last stated by Matt Cutts in this video: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 On the other hand, many people from the SEO community say that only the first link counts. But so far I could not find any data to back this up, which is quite surprising.0 -
Post url not matching with post title ( wordpress)
I have this site called searchoflife.com on which I have noticed the post urls are not matching with the post title. For Example:Post Title - A Dialogue With NaturePost URL - http://searchoflife.com/dialogue-nature-2013-09-12 Words like 'A' and 'with' are not present in the post URL. This has been the trend since a few days. After investigating I found out that it was due to my plugin SEO ultimate which is actually creating post slugs automatically for the post urls. So my question is whether it is advisable to use post slugs instead of the full post url. Does it affect the SERPS for my site?
On-Page Optimization | | toxicpls0 -
How long is too long for domain URL length?
I noticed one of the negatively correlated ranking factors was length of URL. I'm building a page from scratch, we are trying to rank for 'Minneapolis Fitness' and 'Minneapolis Massage'. Is www.minnnepolismassageandfitness.com just ridiculously long? Or does the exact match outweigh the penalty for URL length?
On-Page Optimization | | JesseCWalker2 -
Does it matter if your URL ends in .net or .com?
Someone told me that having a URL that ends in .net (instead of .com) will hurt my site's SEO. Is that true?
On-Page Optimization | | matt-145670 -
Image Optimization - File Name Important?
I am currently working on a site with 100+ recipes that all have image file names that are relevant, but not optimized for keyword purposes. I'm wondering - from an SEO perspective - would it be worth my time to go back through all of the images and rename them with keywords in mind? On my own site I have always done this as a "best practice" but I'm curious - does it make a difference to search engines? Does anyone have any recent research/experiences that they would like to share? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | EssEEmily0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0