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Making archive links more friendly to search engines
 
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sandrasinclair



Joined: 28 Sep 2005
Posts: 5

PostPosted: Fri Nov 03, 2006 5:58 am    Post subject: Making archive links more friendly to search engines Reply with quote

Hi,

I was wondering if there is any way to put the title of a post in a permanent link instead of a number? I think you cn do this in wordpress, but can we do it on blogware? I think it would make it easier for search engines to understand what the relevance of each link for indexing and such.

Thank you,

Sandra
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Fri Nov 03, 2006 12:46 pm    Post subject: Re: Making archive links more friendly to search engines Reply with quote

I was wondering if there is any way to put the title of a post in a permanent link instead of a number?

Unfortunately, that is not possible at this time.

From my research it appears that the perception that this is more "SEO friendly" has nothing to do with search engines somehow understanding the relevance of any given page via its URL (relevance is primarily determined from the content of the page, not from the URL), but has more to do with the fact that some forum software for example can automatically convert URLs to hyperlinks... So if your URL gets pasted into a forum, and the forum does the auto-hyperlinking thing, then the words used as the hyperlink may affect the ranking of the post, in the same way that linking miserable failure to the White House site altered the Google ranking of that term...

If you have a blog whose URLs are likely to be posted often into forums, these types of URLs might give you a slight boost in the search engine rankings... If your URLs are not benefiting from this type of evangelism, than the URL in and of itself will not provide you with a search engine ranking boost.

If anyone can point me to anything more than second hand info on this (I have a friend at Google and he says...) I would be quite thankful to be proven wrong, but at this time, I haven't seen anyone with first hand knowledge saying why these types of URLs would be any more search engine friendly other than the auto-hyperlinking thing...
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Robin



Joined: 07 May 2005
Posts: 94

PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 8:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Two posts on Matt Cutt's (of Google) blog that explain why you should use dashes instead of underscores between words in the URL. Using dashes vs. underscores would obviously be meaningless if Google didn't pay attention to the words in the URL.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-post-vanessa-fox-on-organic-site-review-session/

and from that second article:

Next, consider this page name:

123244ffgfhdsled99eddgdd.html

It doesn’t take a special tool to know that the URL isn’t user-friendly. Compare it to:

african-elephants.html

But you can have too much of a good thing. It also doesn’t take a special tool to know that this page name isn’t user-friendly:

african-elephants-and-their-habitats-and-diet-and-history-and-extinction-possibilities-and-this-page-is-really-great.html

And speaking of putting a dash in URLs, hyphens are often better than underscores [Ed. Note: bolded by Matt Smile ]. african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. It’s doubtful many people will be searching for that.
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 9:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes, I've read those pages many times, and I still don't think they read the way that many people interpret them, but I don't think they disprove my points either...
  • relevance is primarily determined from the content of the page, not from the URL
  • a URL in and of itself will not provide you with a search engine ranking boost
And you can see my point about where the benefit actually comes from, right in your post... Our forum sofware auto-hyperlinked those URLs, and now the words that were part of the URL are the link to the URL.

In any case, we see that in practice folks who blog on our system and blog well (regularly and topically) get excellent rankings in all the search engines, regardless of the URL structure. Your blog is a great example of that; currently you rank:
  • #1 for perfume blog
  • #1 for fragrance blog
  • #1 for fragrance news
  • #2 for fragrance reviews
  • #2 for perfume reviews
  • #5 for perfume news
Very nice. Keep up the great work!
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Robin



Joined: 07 May 2005
Posts: 94

PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 10:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

John, I appreciate your viewpoint, and would agree readily with both of your two key points, but have to respectfully disagree with the more general importance of keywords in URLs. It is true that relevant content is the most important factor, but my competitors are also writing relevant content. Most people come to product blogs by searching for specific product names, not general terms like "perfume blog", and on specific fragrance names I frequently rank second or third after people who are blogging on platforms that allow the keywords to be used in the URL, and this despite the fact that I have more incoming links than any other blog on my topic. I don't think keywords in the URL are necessarily THE most important thing, but they are one more SEO tool and I see the inability to use them on Blogharbor as a big drawback.
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 11:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

despite the fact that I have more incoming links than any other blog on my topic

But that fact will not guarantee that a given page within your site will be ranked higher than a page within another site with less backlinks for every search query.

In any case, I was curious to run some tests to see how your pages stack up in search engine results pages, so I just went to your Fragrance Reviews page and grabbed 6 fragrance names at random, and queried them at Google. Here are my results:
  1. Imperial Jade Emperor - Your review was #3 in the search results; neither of the higher ranked pages contained any of the search term in the URL, and #1 was a so-called "ugly URL" containing a numerical string.
  2. Poison & Tendre Poison - Your review was ranked #1.
  3. Essence of John Galliano - Your review was ranked #1.
  4. Ambra del Nepal - Your review was #2 and another review was #3; #1 was an online store and the URL for the page was another so-called ugly URL.
  5. Aoud Roses Petals - One of your reviews was #1 and that day's category page #2.
  6. Jasmin de Nuit - Your review and archive page were #2 and #3, a catalog page with ugly URLs was #1.
So you seem to be doing pretty well overall. I just picked a few of your more recent pieces and they also seem to do quite well in Google:
  1. Tauer Perfumes Orris - Your review is #1 and home page #2.
  2. Chanel Bois des Iles - Your review is #3 and home page #4. #1 is a blog but the URL does not contain the search term, and #2 is a shopping site which does contain part of the search term.
  3. Bvlgari Omnia Amethyste - Your review is #1 and one of your RSS feeds is #2.
  4. Black Orchid by Tom Ford - OK, here's one where you come in #3 to a page which contains the search terms in the URL...
  5. Roberto Verino Mellow - Your review is #1.
I really just was looking to see for myself how well your pages do. I'm sure we could find more examples which demonstrate your assertion, but I am not sure either of us could prove why you are #1 on a given query or "just" #3...

But after going through this exercise, about all I can say is, wow... Your pages are consistently near the top, if not on top, of every query I tried... I don't see that you have any SEO issue at all; I'm not sure how much higher in the search engine results you could possibly get... Yes, I am sure that you could say that the ultimate goal would be "#1 in search engine results for every perfume name", which sounds impossible to do in theory, but you are so close to that in practice already that it's hard for me to see your URL structure as something that is negatively impacting your ranking in the search engines.
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Robin



Joined: 07 May 2005
Posts: 94

PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 12:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

John, I know I'm beating this already long-dead horse, but my goal is only to beat other blogs on recent perfume releases from big name houses, since that is what most people are actually searching for. You would have no way of knowing, but of the perfume names you searched, Tom Ford Black Orchid is the only one that matters, and many of the others weren't even covered on other blogs. On several other "big" releases that were covered by more than one other blog, I am no. 2 or 3, and I follow blogs with names in URLs.

The difference between no. 2 and no. 1 is huge in terms of clicks, and that is why the keywords in the URL matters to me. Nobody can quantify exactly how much weight Google gives to anything, and maybe in this case it is only a tiny advantage that only comes from being cited in forums. But since I'm cited in forums frequently, even that extra help would be worth having.

And now I promise to drop the matter, and sincere thanks for taking the time to respond Very Happy
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 2:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Agreed, there's a lot we don't know about Google. For example, why are you


Anyhow, thanks for your feedback on this issue. Rearchitecting the URL structure is a huge undertaking, and not likely something we will be doing in the near term, especially since we have so many other things we would like to do for everyone. Perhaps at some point in the future we'll be able to look at this aspect of the system again and come up with some alternatives.
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