Can bots identify shmushed keywords?
-
I remember reading some years ago that domains and pages that have smushed keywords, such as cheapbaseballs.com/redbaseball.html could be identified by Google as "cheap baseballs" and "red base ball". Is this still correct?
-
But to answer you specifically, yes, there is a chance the bots could read the URLs without hyphens.
-
I agree with Cyto. The best practice is to make the URLs easier to read for both humans and bots. The focus should always be user experience. It would be easier to read the URL that contained hyphens, as opposed to the URL without.
-
Let's say they do, but does that mean you stand a better chance to rank higher than a competitor who uses hyphens? If hyphens represent spaces, and a user searches chanel number 5, doesn't that mean a website that has the url chanel-number-5.html might rank better than chanelnumber5.html.
Similar to a human, it would be easier to read chanel-number-5 than chanelnumber5.
So even if the bot reads a url without a hyphen, a competitor with a hyphen might edge out.
That's my two cents
-
However I'm asking about URLs NOT using hyphens and instead using perfumes.com/chanelnumber5.html. Would bots identify the words chanel number 5 without hyphen seperation?
-
In the URL, yes, they can be identified as key terms. I wouldn't necessarily use your domain as a place for your key terms, but you are correct. The URL string following the domain most often uses hyphens to separate words. A lot of platforms are designed to pull the product name as the URL string, so it just adds hyphens in place of the spaces.
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
-
Can we compete for both videos and text results?
Hi, We have a ecommerce website that performs very well for our brand pages on the text results including the reviews snippet. Our brand pages also include embedded videos. Until now we have always ranked poorly on video results. Our videos are hosted over youtube. In order to boost our video result we have recently submitted a video sitemap to help crawlers find out our videos. The result is the following : our brand pages are now only competing in the video results space. Instead of showing as a text result with our reviews snippet, it shows as a video in a carrousel widget. Within the video tab we are ranking top. We have experienced a drop in CTR since then. Moz have reported a drop on all our brand keywords for text search although the video widget shows our brand there. Is there a way to compete for both videos results and text results, making the choice to keey the review snippet widget? Is the video sitemap useful only to compete within the video space? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattam1 -
How can a Page indexed without crawled?
Hey moz fans,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atakala
In the google getting started guide it says **"
Note: **Pages may be indexed despite never having been crawled: the two processes are independent of each other. If enough information is available about a page, and the page is deemed relevant to users, search engine algorithms may decide to include it in the search results despite never having had access to the content directly. That said, there are simple mechanisms such as robots meta tags to make sure that pages are not indexed.
" How can it happen, I dont really get the point.
Thank you0 -
Keyword stuffing
Hi all. I'm working on this page - http://www.alwayshobbies.com/dolls-houses - for the term 'dolls houses'. It's not doing great at the minute (23rd in GUK) and I was wondering if it might be down to the volume of exact match keywords on the page (32). If not, does anyone have any other pointers? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Promoting as Affiliate by Having Nofollow Links, can it hurt
Hello, we have a PR-5 site http://www.updater.in In it - we are promoting Hosting, Web development primarily acting as affiliate to these companies. All links to the best of info are marked as nofollow, but still can it hurt search rankings as visitors are been directed within seconds to the respective partner I mean - the time which a person spends is pretty low and every page is marked as Affiliate. If yes - How to get this corrected with sites acting of such nature thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi1 -
Page URL keywords
Hello everybody, I've read that it's important to put your keywords at the front of your page title, meta tag etc, but my question is about the page url. Say my target keywords are exotic, soap, natural, and organic. Will placing the keywords further behind the URL address affect the SEO ranking? If that's the case what's the first n number of words Google considers? For example, www.splendidshop.com/gift-set-organic-soap vs www.splendidshop.com/organic-soap-gift-set Will the first be any less effective than the second one simply because the keywords are placed behind?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0 -
SEOMoz Keyword Ranking Accuracy
Getting some mixed message on this. Is the keyword ranking informational available in SEOMoz based on the data in Mozscape or based on live Google data? Reason I ask is that my ranking for "crown moulding" for www.worldofmoulding differs: Based on the today's scan my www.worldofmoulding.com ranks in position 40 in Google. Based on a manual check with cleared out cache no local setting ... the site is 4th spot Running a third party check using "Advanced Web Ranking" tool it comes up in 9th spot, but they count the local business SERPs in which case it matches my manual search. It seems that SEOMoz is not in line with actual ranking. Any suggestion for what can be used to accurately asses SERP placement for terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
Am I keyword stuffing my titles?
I run a site where I answer questions. As I answer each question I choose a title for the page. I have been trying to get good keywords in my titles, but now I am wondering if I have been keyword stuffing them and perhaps I should be more succinct. So, let's say I had a question about a sore back. Here would be the title tag I would use: Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help. | My Main Keyword That's a fictitious example, but the idea is that I would be trying to get the keywords "back", "sore", "spinal", "pain", "relief" "help" and my main website keyword into the title. As I'm writing this I'm seeing the folly in this. I think it would likely be much better to simply have a title of Why is my back sore? So, I have three questions: 1. Is it better to have a succinct title targeting one keyword/keyword phrase than to get lots of keywords in my title? 2. Should I be putting my main keyword after each of my title? Shortly after doing this on 1700+ pages I was #1 for my main keyword. But, I was also doing other things as well to boost my presence for this keyword. 3. If I decide to do more succinct titles, how would you suggest I go about running a test to see which is better? Looking forward to your responses! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Keyword Self-Cannibalization Concern
Right now I have an E-Commerce website that has layered menu properties. I have one page trying to rank for "NextGen Digital Ballast" that is the main category page. However, on that category page I link out to three product pages which would be "NextGen 400W Digital Ballast", "NextGen 600W Digital Ballast" and "NextGen 1000W Digital Ballast". The on page ranking factors tools is saying I may need to consider making adjustments because of the potential self-cannibalization, but I wanted to get some feedback to see what others thought about that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JerDoggMckoy2