Do SEO-friendly URLs really affect a page's ranking?

Question

SEO-friendly URLs are all the rage these days. But do they actually have a meaningful impact on a page's ranking in Google and other search engines? If so, why? If not, why not?

(Note that I would absolutely agree that SEO-friendly URLs are nicer to use for human beings. My question is whether they actually make a difference to the ranking algorithms.)

Update: As it turns out, the Google post that endorphine points to here has caused tremendous confusion in the SEO community. For a sampling of the discussion, see here, here, and here. Part of the problem is that the Google post is addressing the worst case where URL rewriting is done poorly and so you'd be better off sticking with a dynamic URL rather than a mangled static "SEO-friendly" URL.

There's no question dynamic URLs can be crawled by Google and can achieve high rankings. Maybe it would be easier to reframe the question more concretely: given 2 otherwise equivalent pages, which will rank higher for the search "do seo friendly urls really affect page ranking"?

A) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/505793/do-seo-friendly-urls-really-affect-a-pages-ranking

or

B) http://stackoverflow.com?question=505793 (a fake URL for comparison only)

Answer 1

I will let google answer to your question:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html

In the article:

Which can Googlebot read better, static or dynamic URLs? [...]While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static

Answer 2

Even if search engines didn't give your pages a better rank, you should still do it for the users. Any benefit for SEO is just icing on your site.

SEOmoz had an article with suggestions for URL best practices along with reasons why each is helpful for usability or search engines.

Answer 3

I don't think this question is readily answerable except by anecdotal evidence, since no two pages are "otherwise equivalent" enough to measure in the sense you're asking. Beyond a Google search engineer emerging and divulging the answer, if one exists that's limited to only this property, you're unlikely to get a definitive answer; more likely, you'll get a long stream of most-likelies.

But I do like the suggestion that descriptive URLs improve the user experience; I think that's true with respect to short URLs, definitely (e.g., "/help", or "/ask", etc.). One just has to decide how valuable that benefit is to the project, when weighed against the cost of creating such URL schemes, which can sometimes be pricey; I've had a couple of clients who've spent thousands on exactly this effort, with no measurable effect in search ranking whatever.

Answer 4

Keyword frequency and pagerank are really the two main factors in SEO.

It follows, then, that including keywords in your URLs is desirable.

e.g. http://my_site.com/article/keyword is better than http://mysite.com/article/42

Answer 5

All else being equal, both pages will achieve the same pagerank. Pagerank is determined by how many people link to you and what their page rank is. So, it does not affect your pagerank.

But it does affect how high you will end up in the search results. In the search index, not only page rank but also keyword relevance matters. If you have the keywords in your url and someone searches for them, then your page will be more relevant and be higher in the search results. Also, when people link to you then the keyword-rich URLs they use to link to you will also improve your relevance.

Don't stare yourself blind at pagerank. It doesn't matter that much. What matters is that you get found by people. Pagerank is only a small (and ever decreasing) part of that.

Answer 6

nah, SEO-friendly URLs where needed back in the days when spiders had troubles reading an extra complicated url, other than this do not think there is any impact. you could use this http://ministatus.com tool to test how your website is doing with and without the friendly url, download the pdf result and do another check couple of weeks later when you'll change your url.