www.example.com/archives/2008/11/27/dates-and slashes-what-to-avoid-in-search-engine-friendly-urls/

Having URL’s with too many slashes in the year 2005, was still negative for your rankings. In 2007 Matt Cutts stated that the number of slashes in your URL isn’t a factor in your Google rankings anymore (Source: Stephan Spencer on Cnet).

But a SEF URL should make the optimal use of the URL by placing the targeted keywords in it, without diluting the value by having many unrelated terms in the URL. This principle is actually the same as how you write your title tags, although with URL’s you don’t have to make a proper sentence.

Having dates in your URL’s might still have a negative impact on your rankings, even if the impact is very small, because it doesn’t add value to the search engines and visitors can find the date within the post itself anyway.

So what is the best URL structure?

That depends on how big a site is and on how the information architecture is done. For smaller sites and especially blogs, a structure with the category and page title or only the page title is probably the best.

For bigger sites the category, page title and optional the page ID will do the job just fine.

Rewriting URL’s in Wordpress

To do this in Wordpress go to Options - Permalink. Then Choose Custom Structure and fill in the following:

For domain/category/pagetitle/
/%category%/%postname%/

For domain/pagetitle/
/%postname%/

For domain/category/pagetitle-pageID/
/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%/

What we have on Conversem:
/%postname%-%post_id%/

On this site the URL structure exist of the page title and post ID, because of several reasons. One reason is that posts often and up being in more than one category and I don’t like it when Wordpress gives the wrong category name in the URL of the page. The reason to have the post ID in the URL is to have a difference between pages and posts within Wordpress.

So normally the URL will look like this:

http://www.conversem.com/dates-slashes-what-to-avoid-in-search-engine-friendly-urls-2/

The above URL is pretty acceptable, but because Wordpress has auto generated this URL it contains a lot of irrelevant words which dilutes the value of the important words in the URL. To fix this you can either remove all the irrelevant words yourself or use a plug-in called the Clean Slugs Plug-in from yoast (you need to sign up for his newsletter to get it).

After cleaning up your URL it should look like this:

http://www.conversem.com/search-engine-friendly-urls-35/

Now it only includes words we want to rank high for.

Rules in writing URL’s

To write good URL’s you should take a look at this PowerPoint presentation from Stephan Spencer, but for us, the following two issues are the most important: Hyphens are preferred over underscores to separate words and try to use not much more than 5 hyphens in your URL’s.

Post from: conversem

Post from: conversem