How Additional Characters and Numbers in URL affect SEO
-
Hi fellow SEOmozers,
I noticed that a lot of websites have additional characters and words at the end of the URL in addition keyword optimized URL. Mostly for E-Commerce sites
For example: www.yoursite.com/category/keyword?id=12345&Keyword--Category--cm_jdkfls_dklj or wwww.yoursite.com/category/keyword#83939=-37292
My question is how does the additional characters or parameters(not necessarily tracking parameters) affect SEO? Does it matter if i have additional keywords in the additional stuff in the URL (1st url example)?
If you can provide more information, that would be helpful.
Thank you!
-
I've never experienced a noticable, direct effect in this regard, and have experience with ranking pages well with crazy parameters. As long as things are canonicalized properly and the system isn't creating a bunch of duplicate pages with different parameters, you should be fine.
-
Hi William,
Yup, totally understand that what's best for user is best for search engine. I also agree that having a simple and clean URL www.yoursite.com/category/keyword is definitely better and has more benefits than www.yoursite.com/category/keyword?id=1234%Keyword-_-......
Let's not compared them to the optimized URL but what do you effect does it have on SEO? Does it harm the site in general with this type of URL? Or no effect at all since it also included the keywords in the front and the parameters don't play a role.
-
When in doubt, the answer is almost always the same as the answer to, "What is best for the user?"
Users can't make sense of all those parameters, and bots aren't likely to either. A site like Amazon.com or Canon.com can get away with it, because they have so many other factors going for them. Also, some systems create these parameters automatically, and can't easily be optimized.
So, to answer your question: It's best not to have those parameters. Users like it without them, and it makes it easier for people to link to you, since URLs are more memorable. On the other side of that, it's not the end of the world if you can't do this in an easy manner and your time might be better spent elsewhere.
-
Hi,
Thanks for the article, it help answer some of my questions. However, the examples in the article compared 2 not optimized URLs with 1 keyword included URL. It makes sense that the 3rd URL will perform better as it includes keyword for search engine, users to understand what the page is about and all the other benefits from optimizing the URL.
- Amazon.com - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007TJ5OG/102-8372974-4064145?v=glance&n=502394&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&n=3031001&s=photo&v=glance
- Canon.com - http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=145&modelid=11158
- DPReview.com - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canonsd400/
However, in my first example: www.yoursite.com/category/keyword?id=12345&Keyword--Category--cm_jdkfls_dklj
The URL included keywords which tell users what the page is about but it also included additional dynamic parameters.
I'm just wondering if these additional dynamic parameters play any role in SEO. Harm or benefit?
-
This is a pretty good explanation, http://moz.com/learn/seo/url
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
-
Search results performance affected by similarly named Adult business?!
Hey This is an unusual one I guess and one we've scratched our heads on for ages without reaching any definitive answer, so would be very grateful to the Moz community for some thought and guidance! Client website: https://www.themassagerooms.com This is a professionally run, therapeutic health business offering on-demand ("mobile", ie visiting customers at their homes) massage service. Importantly, please note again (you'll see why in a minute) the exact URL and the fact that this business, our client, is a registered therapeutic health and wellness business (ie it is genuine, real, massage services). The business has been around for about 10 years and used to rank very highly for many dream keywords for their industry. However, several years ago they got approached by a domain reseller offer to sell them "massagerooms.com" (ie the same name but without the "The" at the beginning) for a few thousand pounds. They rejected the offer. Interesting Aside: This happened a short while before the Facebook movie was launched ... if they'd seen that movie perhaps they would have accepted! (Facebook was originally called The Facebook but then one of the key investors advised them to drop the "The"! Anyway, unfortunately for them, that offered domain name (massagerooms.com) was then sold to an online adult video services company. Soon after, themassagerooms.com rankings started to suffer. Today, TheMassageRooms.com have a technically very clean site (great scores on Google LightSpeed etc), with regularly updated relevant health and wellness content. They are doing ok in terms of rankings but no where near as well as many of their competitors who on the face of it seem to have significantly worse on and off-page scores as well as many spammy links. Also, TheMassageRooms.com have a much better Moz DA then those competitors that are ranking better. The big question is whether the existence of an adult services website, MassageRooms.com with such a similar name is causing them issues in search results? Especially since many people (regular customers and even their own staff), do search for TheMassageRooms (ie the therapeutic health and wellness company) by only typing "massage rooms". So, there is a clear argument for saying "The Massage Rooms" = "Massage Rooms" in many respects, even through the two URLs which match these exact terms lead to very different businesses. Of course, one solution, might be to change the URL and 301 redirect everything. But would that actually make a difference if the actual issue is that Google's algorithm is somehow connected "MassageRooms.com" (adult site) with "TheMassageRooms.com" (our client's health and wellness site). Also it seems a bit drastic to ask them to change a 10 year established brand name etc.
Algorithm Updates | | AmerTMR0 -
301 redirect to URL plus anchor tag???
Hi - my company has just had a site redesign completed, and our "old" site we have landing pages for a full product line. The new design has taken the content from those landing pages and placed them into one long scrolling page. We currently rank well on the "old" landing pages but now all that content is contained in a single page with anchor tags throughout attached to the headings. Can you set up 301's to anchor tags? Example: old site www.mysite.com/products/automotive/auto-parts.html new site: www.mysite.com/products/automotive#auto-parts
Algorithm Updates | | Jenny10 -
Are there any alternative ranking strategies for not a blog site other than on site SEO, speed improvement, building backlinks and social media engagement to improve rankings?
We own a horoscope website and looking for some SEO advice.However most of the websites are blog sites therefore most of the SEO content is about how to rank a blog site better. IE getting new quality content, use anchor text link out etc. However if your site is different by nature it is hard to find good advice on how to rank better in these scenarios. I would like to know if there are alternative ways of increasing rankings apart from the usual strategies of improving social media fan pages, building backlinks and optimising the site speed wise and making it accessible and understandable to crawlers and people too.
Algorithm Updates | | websitebuilder0 -
SEO Audit after Penguin 2.1 what are you guys seeing? this is my thougts
We have looked at around 2000 sites since Penguin 2.1 launched a few weeks back. These include our customers and their own competitors site. We are going through all the data which is obviously going to take some time. Hopefully we will publish a report on our findings as we are happy to share. What I currently see in my early analysis is Roughly 70% of sites tested have 0% exact match Anchor Text for their money keywords. The other 30% have less than 5% exact match Anchor Text. The quality of the links is often still poor to the sites ranking on page 1. The content surrounding the links is only about 10-15% of the time related to the money keywords. The loading time of the sites ranking seems to not matter, we encountered a lot of slow sites. Design and usability of the site was not important. We are not seeing much impact via Social media, a lot of these sites are small business Less than 10% of sites on page 1 had a Google+ account More than 40% of page 1 sites had Facebook profiles. More than 80% of the sites ranking on page 1 had less than 100 links to the landing page that ranked What are your opinions of helping to recover if hit by the above??? Q) If you have too high an anchor text percentage and have been hit or may get hit in the future would you. a) create some more high quality links with more varied anchor text, ie Click here, brand name etc b) not create any more links just remove the links you have to dilute the anchor text c) change the anchor text on links you are able to These figures are a work in progress so data will change just wanting to share our early findings and try to get a good conversation going. What are you guys seeing?
Algorithm Updates | | tempowebdesign0 -
Video SEO <video:uploader>sitemap optional tag for Google+</video:uploader>
Anyone know the specifics or using the video:uploaderoptional tag for Google+ for rel=”author” attribution. for video sitemap?</video:uploader> Related post has some info, but no specific example. http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/getting-video-results-in-google/ Quote from above link: "Good practice is to ensure that the
Algorithm Updates | | Packetman007
video:uploaderelement links to a Google+ profile or a blog profile
page with rel=”author” attribution. "</video:uploader> This is what it seems it should look like in the video sitemap: <video:uploader info="<a href=" https:="" plus.google.com="" 111123738944093379428"="" target="_blank">https://plus.google.com/111123738944093379428">Bill
Alderson</video:uploader> If you know this works and is worth editing video sitmaps to add the optional tag, let me know your experience. Alternately, my site (and each page, thanks to Yoast SEO for WP) does have the rel="author" linked to Google+ for every page, which may make the sitemap entry moot, but I have not yet seen this work in that manner. If you know it does or does not work, please let me know. Please let me know if you have any better information or specific experience. Also, if I elect to edit my sitemaps (provided by Wistia.com and BitsontheRun) to include this tag, what XML Sitemap Tool might work well to add these tags properly? Seems there is lots of XML Sitemap tools, but few really address Video Sitemap options specifically. Thanks, [email protected] www.apalytics.com0 -
Confused About Addon Domains and SEO
I find addon domains really confusing. Everyone I've asked so far says that they don't affect SEO but I find that really hard to believe considering the same content is on both a subdomain and a subfolder and also has it's own unique domain. PLUS (in my case) completely different niche sites are sharing the same hosting. I really don't want to pay for hosting for all of my different sites but at the same time, if it's better/safer to do so for Panda/Penguin reasons I'm happy to do that. Thank you for your time. I look forward to your opinions/suggestions!
Algorithm Updates | | annasusmiles0 -
SEO Ranking & Brand Names
I have several situations where one of my sites rank organically in 4th or 5th place for a specific search term relating to a 'big brand' .. I usually fall in behind the brands main website .. commercially this is very good for me. Let me give you an example .. in google.co.uk type in 'thomas cook exchange rates'. I rank position 4 (comparecurrency.co.uk). Position 1-3 are thomas cook's own pages. Naturally. However, my question is .. could I outrank them and how could I initially measure the effort involved in getting to position 1? I noticed Google recently put me into position 1 for this term and then quickly (within a few days) pulled me back down to position 4. Does anyone have any experience of this type of search positioning and have any information that may help me? My gut feel is that I have maybe maxed out the economically viable potential of these keywords and that I should invest my SEO $s into other phrases? Thanks in advance Olly
Algorithm Updates | | ojkingston0 -
SEO Test: Domain Hyphenation [Update]
In May I announced test results for domain hyphenation but after a 3 month followup the results have changed and the hyphenated domain now wins on what seems to be the first link instance advantage. I was unable to discover any other factors which may have influenced this test but if anyone has any ideas I would like to hear about it. Here are the details of the SEO test and revealed URLs.
Algorithm Updates | | Dan-Petrovic1