Does URL design affect page rank in search engine results?

Question

I am especially interested in Google search results. Some web-sites use category IDs in their URLs while others use a more contemporary method of "friendly urls". I.e:

Old URLs: mywebsite.com/23151/32/

New URLs: mywebsite.com/my-category/my-page

If the new method is used, is the page's rank going to increase? (provided that all other things stay the same).

Say, I have a web-site which has a decent page rank but I want to increase it. It has lots of pages and it uses the old URL style. Is it worth changing the URL design to the new friendly style for SEO reasons?

P.S. When I say page rank I mean rank of the page in search results rather than Google PageRank.

Answer 1

Yes, it matters. See Google's guide to SEO, specifically the stuff starting around page 6 and 7.

Answer 2

Hi,

If you take a look at the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide linked from this post : Google's SEO Starter Guide

You'll see a section that says something along the lines of

Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines.

Also, it can create easier, "friendlier" URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.

(Pages 6 and 7)

It also says :

Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.

So, I guess it can at least do no harm -- on the contrary ;-)

And you have to admit, for your users, it looks way better... And that's probably what really matters, and why search engines take this into account...

Answer 3

Yes and no. While there is what seems to be evidence that keywords in urls do have some limited effect on rankings, there is no concrete proof that you will gain any benefits by simply implementing an url structure of that kind.

On the other hand, "pretty" urls are much more human-friendly and, aside from being easier to remember, might even bring you more clicks from the SERPS (just like good titles do).

If you are asking if you should implement them, my answer would be yes, but only if it's for a new site, or if you are absolutely sure you know what you are doing, and know how to remap old urls to new via .htaccess etc. Changing all your urls without giving the bots a map to help them explore the new structure is likely to hurt your rankings real bad.