URL Names not so important in future?
-
I read somewhere (hard to say where with all the information about SEO and google!) that in the future, Google will put less importance on the URL name for ranking purposes. Any thoughts?
-
URLs will always be important in lots of ways;
- They are seen by users in many cases (as links, in social media and even the SERPs) and can help improve CTR.
- They are extremely important to the overall site architecture - and especially for information architecture.
- They can often become the anchor text in links.
- They help a user when browsing the site, as if they represent the structure or "level" depth (almost like breadcrumbs) is can make the navigating experience easier.
I don't think URLs are something Google looks at in a simplistic way like "oh you're URL says X keyword, we're gonna weigh that keyword more" - I think all of these factors feed into the importance of URLs and I don't see that value diminishing anytime soon.
-Dan
-
I think ever since firefox came out with the amazing bar and google became the new http they have had to rank domain names high in the SERPS, as there is always a chance that that is what you are looking for if you put it into your browser address bar.
However, it is not beyond thinking that google will rank things differently depending on how you search. Searching on a mobile phone provides different results to searching on your desktop. So why not searching from your browser location bar giving different results to searching from the google homepage? With the google homepage giving less relevance to domain names as a signal.
I am sure Google are more than capable of being data led and seeing if those things correlate and making the necessary changes.
Other ways in which domain names become less relevant are through such things as apps and social media games. Take instagram as an example. An online business that made its name before it even had a domain name. It was a solid app, searched for and shared through the mobile phone market places and then via facebook.
With the battle from facebook to essentially become your desktop and the entire internet - like AOL tried doing many years back, in which everything should be run through their systems and their framework I hope that domain names do not become obsolete as the prospect scares me a little.
First time posting here.
Figured I had to start somewhere.
-
Im sure it is possible it could devalue down the road, but Title, URL and Body are one of the easiest ways to identify if the content is relevant. Google also takes in account bounce rate so if 'title', 'url' and 'body' are targeting 'shoes', but your website is about garage install it will be able to tell immediately that your site is not relevant.
-
I can't speak for the future but late last year I changed the url structure of my site and saw a pretty significant improvement in my rankings.
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
-
URL in SERP: Google's stand
Months back, we can notice "keyword" will be bold and highlighted if its in the SERP URL. Now Google no more highlights any URLs even with exact match of keyword we search. Beside UI, Does this mean Google might devalued or reduced the importance of URL as ranking factor? We can see many search results match partially or completely in URL with search keywords.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Fresh content..how important to SERP position?
I've heard that fresh content helps boost your position in the serps. If i wrote all new unique content on some of my pages that havent been changed in several years, would i see a boost in the rank? If so, how many positions?
Algorithm Updates | | Ron100 -
Case Sensitive URL Redirects for SEO
We want to use a 301 redirect rule to redirect all pages to a lower case url format. A 301 passes along most of the link juice... most. Will we even see a negative impact in PageRank/SERPS when we redirect every single page on our site?
Algorithm Updates | | tcanders0 -
Images added to website automatically become URLs - is this an issue?
Hello Mozzers! I've just been trawling through a website and noticed all of the images had their own URLs. There's a bespoke CMS and that's how it works with images... So out of 1447 urls, 1314 are images. Firstly, is this an issue / problem from an SEO perspective. If it is, how should I deal with it? Thanks in advance, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Canonical URl
Hello, All the pages of my site contained canonical url it shows me in the source, but on seomoz site it shows error that some the pages not containing canonical urls, anyone will help me ??
Algorithm Updates | | KLLC0 -
Similar URLs
If I have two similar urls: www.investormill.com/unemployment-rate and www.investormill.com/unemployment-rate-annual Would this confuse search engines or "cannibalize" my content? For clarity: the first page would provide data on the monthly unemployment rate, the second would provide an annual unemployment rate figure. So, there would be a unique series on each page. Just trying to figure out how to best approach this when crafting urls. Thanks for your help!
Algorithm Updates | | investormill0 -
How do I rank multiple pages for my busness/domain name?
When someone searches for our business's name (which is also the domain name) we have one listing (with sitelinks) at the top - however I would also like to rank 2nd, 3rd and 4th for this term. Any suggestions on how this might be done? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | CaBStudios0 -
Urls have dates - bad? terrible?
My URLs include dates: example.com/2009-05/post-about-something.html I know this isn't the 'best', but is there any reason to be concerned? Some panda, duplicate content, google hates date in URLs, I should know about?
Algorithm Updates | | comforteagle0