Cost/Benefit of modifying a URL

[FrankSweeney]

Just as the title says, I'm looking for the cost/benefit breakdown of modifying a URL for SEO purposes. What are some examples of issues where the benefit outweighs the cost, and vise-versa?

Thanks all!

Frank

[EGOL]

Yep, all of my future URLs will be nice and tidy and have SEO value.

Just not changing them.  Good thing I am the boss here. 

[SEOAndy]

i believe they hold little real SEO value, but are memorable and can be used to help navigate around the website. This said breadcrumbs would work just as well and good categorisation

[EGOL]

In my opinion, the benefits of modifying a URL are really really low.

There are lots of factors in the algo and the URL is just one very tiny weak one.

The benefit that you get is an incentive to plan your URLs properly the next time.  

I run a site that I purchased and I don't care for the URLs that the previous owner created, but I think that it is a waste to redirect pages that have lots of links and have the server repeatedly process a list of URLs in the htaccess file.

So, this isn't just a philosophy, it is what I do on my own sites.

I am lucky that I am not the webmaster for a boss who wants to have all of these tidy URLs... we would have arguments about it.

[SEOAndy]

cost to benefit ratio is hard to really give you a good answer, benefits are given above the cost depends on the platform you use and also where the site is hosted. For instance changing urls on wordpress or drupal is fairly easy and relatively cheap, compared to say a bespoke system which may have various issues around url changing (i've seen many sites break due to url updates not being done correctly).

for a better explanation than we can all give in this small space check this page from SEOMoz (the best practices bit has benefits in it) http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/url

[WhoWuddaThunk]

For cases where you are going from dynamic urls to keyword rich ones, it definitely pays off.

i.e. domain.com/112342 to domain.com/keywords

For cases where you are switching from underscores to dashes in the url, it might not pay off.  That would depend on how competitive the vertical is, and if your competitors are doing it properly.  In most cases this change would not be worth it, but if things are really intense on that search, and you can't seem to budge with your internal page, it might be considered.