Numbers (2432423) in URL
-
Hello All Mozers,
Quick question on URL. I know URL is important and should include keywords and all that but my question is does including numbers (not date or page numbers but numbers for internal use) in the URL affect SEO? For example, www.domain.com/screw-driver,12,1,23345.htm Is that any better or worse than www.domain.com/screw-driver.htm?
I understand that this is not user friendly but in SEO stand point does it hurt ranking? What's your opinion on this?
Thank you!
-
Numbers in the URL never hurt rankings! It’s just that your URL should be easy to read and follow the standard length... too long URLs might get you in to trouble from user experience as well as from the crawling and indexing point of view.
Search Engine Journal (know blog for SEO and Online Marketing Updates) do use numbers in there URL! http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-relying-on-organic-search-traffic-alone-is-a-risky-business/65324/ << The URL ends at the number!
Hope this answer your question!
-
Agree! Plus, only letters would consume more computing resources as you need to do a DB query on that text. The more articles/products you have the worse it will become. Numbers will solve that problem.
-
Numbers in a URL does not have a negative effect on rank. The clearer the URL the better but if you have your keyword in the URL (even with extra numbers) you are okay. Best practices say that dynamic URLs should be converted to SEO friendly urls, this can be done in the settings of your website content management system.
-
I have not seen numbers in a URL hurt SEO. I do have issues with commas in your URL as they do not play nice when you copy and paste them. I would use dashes.
If you are looking to try and become a Google News publisher, Google requires numbers in the URL
https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68323?hl=en
I have also used numbers in the URL to help with my backup 301 redirects
Say you have a url
/articles/34543-slug-goes-here.html
The # in the URL is the article ID in my database. If I get a error on any one of these urls (and they happen)
/articles/34543-slug-goes-here.htm
/articles/34543-slug-goes-h
/articles/34543-slu
/articles/34543
/articles/34543-slug-goes-Here.html
etc
My system just has to match on the ID of the article and then will 301 to the correct URL.
I think the key is not to overkill on the numbers to make them too many digits long etc.
Also, if you are only depending on slugs to differentiate URLs then you have to have a system to make sure they are unique each time. Using an ID number in the URL ensures they are unique.
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
-
Ranking after redirecting two URLs to a new domain
I run two websites which operate in similar business sectors. Each has a calculator tool that offers the same functionality. The pages rank 2nd and 5th for the key search term. I'd like to improve the functionality of this and have thought about setting up a new domain for this calculator to move it away from the main sites. If I did this and 301 redirected both pages to the new domain do you think I'd maintain a strong ranking position for this search term on the new domain? Thanks for any advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigramsay0 -
How much does URLs with CAPS and URLs with non-CAPS existing on an IIS site matter nowadays?
I work on a couple ecommerce sites that are on IIS. Both sites have return a 200 header status for the CAPS and non CAPS version of the URLs. While I suppose it would be ok if the canonicals pointed to the same version of the page, in some cases it doesn't (ie; /Home-Office canonicalizes to itself and /home-office canonicalizes to itself). I came across this article (http://www.searchdiscovery.com/blog/case-sensitive-urls-and-seo-case-matters/) that is a few years old and I'm wondering how much of an issue it is and how I would determine if it is/isn't?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OfficeFurn0 -
Demoting a URL (not-WMT Related)
I have a pharmaceutical brand that treats two diseases, but wants to primarily promote one. We want searches for "brand dosing" to go to Side A, but currently "brand dosing" goes to Side B. BUT, I want "brand dosing Side B" to still show up in organic search, so a noindex on Side B, or canonicalization of Side A, won't work. Essentially, I want any searches that are not specific to a disease treatment to go to Side A, and then specific Side B related searches, go to Side B. Because this is a client paying me to optimize their site, I obviously want to optimize their whole site, so only optimizing Side A, or unoptimizing Side B, aren't solutions I want to employ. I don't think a solution exists, but I figured my fellow Mozers would know best. Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GTO_Pharma_SEO0 -
Woo Commerce Woo Compare Urls Indexing?
Hi I am using Wordpress/Woo commerce for my site Thetotspot.co.uk http://www.thetotspot.co.uk/?action=yith-woocompare-add-product&id=1412&_wpnonce=a5560b1b07 But I am getting a lot of temporary redirects registering in Moz for things like the above - woo compare / add to cart links Anyone come across this - how did you get solve? I am using Yoast SEO currently, have no indexed archives and pages of archive etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kelly33300 -
Long urls created by filters (not with query parameters)
A website adds subfolders to a category URL for each filter that's selected. In a crawl of the website some of these URLs reach over 400 characters. For example, if I select shoe size 5, 5.5 and 6, white and blue colour, price $70-$100, heel and platform styles, the URL will be as follows: www.example.com/shoes/womens/filters/shoe-size--5--5.5--6/color--white--blue/price--70-100/style--heel--platform There is a canonical that points to www.example.com/shoes/womens/ so it isn't a duplicate content issue. But these URLs still get crawled. How would you handle this? It's not a great system so I'm tempted to tell them to start over with best practice recommendations, but maybe I should just tell them to block the "/filters/" folder from crawlers? For some products however, filtered content would be worth having in search indexes (e.g. colour).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
What is the best URL structure for categories?
A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Two homepage urls
We have two different homepages for our website. One is designed for daytime users (i.e. businesses), whereas the second night version is designed with home consumers in mind. Is this hurting our SEO by having two homepage urls, instead of just building a strong presence around one? We have set up canonical meta on each one: On the night version: domain.com/indexnight.html we have a On the day version: domain.com/index.html we have a It seems to me that we should just choose one of them and set up a permanent 301 redirect from one to the other. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessieT0 -
Googlebot crawling partial URLs
Hi guys, I've checked my email this morning and I've got a number of 404 errors over the weekend where Google has tried to crawl some of my existing pages but not found the full URL. Instead of hitting 'domain.com/folder/complete-pagename.php' it's hit 'domain.com/folder/comp'. This is definitely Googlebot/2.1; http://www.google.com/bot.html (66.249.72.53) but I can't find where it would have found only the partial URL. It certainly wasn't on the domain it's crawling and I can't find any links from external sites pointing to us with the incorrect URL. GoogleBot is doing the same thing across a single domain but in different sub-folders. Having checked Webmaster Tools there aren't any hard 404s and the soft ones aren't related and haven't occured since August. I'm really confused as to how this is happening.. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | panini0