I have a website and I'm employing Clean URLs to all of the links. I'm wondering what the opinion is about short, basic URLs versus longer, descriptive URLs.
For instance, if my website was about Georgia Bulldog football news, which would be better for SEO purposes?
or
http://www.example.com/georgia-bulldog-football-news
I've read quite a bit, but I'm torn on the simple vs. descriptive factor. Can anyone give opinions based on SEO experience?
The descriptive format, as the search engine can pick up keywords inside the URL. Apart from that, I don't think there's much difference. I personally prefer the simple format, but I'm obsessed with URLs!
No one but Google knows for sure exactly how much this factors into rankings, but it helps and Google recommends that you use hyphens (just as you demonstrated). This also tends increase clickthroughs from search result pages. I found this article very useful:
http://searchengineland.com/supercharge-your-urls-for-maximum-seo-impact-14006
Think of it in terms of the end user.
I don't know how much Google really uses URLs in its rankings. It's something that can be so obviously spoofed (like keywords) that I suspect it's low in their algorithm. The heart of what they do is to count incoming links, and trying to discern meaning of the actual page contents.
But users appreciate readable URLs. It gives them a hint of what they will be getting. I know that a readable URL greatly increases the likelihood that I will click on something (in an email, say).
I love the second one.
No.1 In the perspective of SEO, It will be better if you add keywords in your URL.(it will be better to add keywords than null,not sure exactly how much this count in ranking though) and take SRACKOVERFLOW.COM is doing the same.
No.2 In the standpoint of visitors, the second one is readable. It good for end users, there is no reason for google to not count this element!
Readability is nice, and may help your rankings. In your example the exact domain is important e.g.
georgiabulldogs.com/news
and
southerncollegesports.com/news
will leave a user with very different expectations.
In some cases typability is also important, and long hyphenated or ID ridden URLs are terrible anytime you may expect people to type in a URL.