Google SEO: Search Engine Friendly URLs

Clean URLS (or search engine friendly urls) are just that – easy to read, simple. You do not need clean urls in a site architecture for Google to spider a site successfully (Update 23/9/08 – apparently confirmed by Google), although I do use clean urls as a default these days, and have done so for years.

Is there a massive difference in Google when you use clean urls?

No, in my experience it’s very much a second or third order effect, perhaps even less, if used on it’s own. EDIT: Recent observations I have made seem to indicate they might be more valuable in 2010.

The thinking is that you might get a boost in Google SERPS if your URLS are clean – because you are using keywords in the actual page name instead of a parameter or ID number. Google might reward the page some sort of relevance because of the actual file / page name.

On it’s own, this boost, in my experience is virtually non-detectable. Where this benefit is slightly detectable is when people (say in forums) link to your site with the url as the link. Then it is fair to say you do get a boost because keywords are in the actual anchor text link to your site, and I believe this is the case, but again, that depends on the quality of the page linking to your site – ie if Google trusts it and it passes Page Rank (!) and anchor text relevance. And of course, you’ll need citable content on that site of yours.

Sometimes I will remove the stop-words from a url and leave the important keywords as the page title because a lot of forums garble a url to shorten it.

I configure urls the following way;

1. www.hobo-web.co.uk/?p=292 — is automatically changed by the CMS using url rewrite to
2. www.hobo-web.co.uk/websites-clean-search-engine-friendly-urls/ — which I then break down to something like
3. www.hobo-web.co.uk/search-engine-friendly-urls/

It should be remembered it is thought although Googlebot can crawl sites with dynamic URLs, it is assumed by many webmasters there is a greater risk that it will give up if the urls are deemed not important and contain multiple variables and session IDs (theory).

As standard, I use clean URLS where possible on new sites these days, and try to keep the URLS as simple as possible and do not obsess about it. That’s my aim at all times when I seo – simplicity.

Be aware though – Google does look at keywords in the URL even in a granular level. Having a keyword in your URL might be the difference between your site ranking and not – check out

• Does Google Count A Keyword In The URI (Filename) When Ranking A Page?

Written by Shaun Anderson