In terms of a site's SEO, is the following format best:
https://www.example.com/query/who-is-the-hippo-in-Moon-Knight
Or can a website do just as well SEO-wise if it has URLs like this?
https://www.example.com/query/62677ebabe5ab3e33e93f7c4
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Maximillian Laumeister
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vivek kn
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For SEO you shouldn't use "query" or "search" in the URL. Google doesn't want to index other search results. Having URLs like that makes me suspicious that the pages are powered by search. See Search results in search results - Matt Cutts – Stephen Ostermiller Apr 27 '22 at 11:38
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2This question is related and might even completely answer your question: Are keywords in URLs good SEO or needlessly redundant? – Stephen Ostermiller Apr 27 '22 at 11:40
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Read more of Google - Keep a simple URL structure https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/url-structure – Apr 29 '22 at 06:38
2 Answers
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Yes it matters if it's human readable. It's a minor ranking factor. It probably won't make or break you, but, think of it like doing an extra credit question on a quiz. You'll get a few bonus points for it.
There are two areas it matters. The first is initial rankings. If you have human keywords in your url you will rank higher than an exact duplicate of the site with a long seemingly random url. If you've ever seen the seo table of elements urls are on there. If you google search a term on desktop if the search term is in the url, that term will be bolded. That means Google considers it to be a ranking factor for the term.
Humans respond to urls that are written to humans so it leads to an increase in CTR. More people click to them. A high CTR page will grow in rankings over time.
Leonard Treman
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1I don't believe that bolding terms on the front-end necessarily means that Google uses them in their ranking algorithm. – Maximillian Laumeister Apr 28 '22 at 23:22
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On a google search, keywords are bolded (on the google search results page). Historically, keywords in the url were also bolded. They only bold the keyword in the meta description on SERPs now. I think John Mueler once said that keywords in urls were also a ranking factor. – Leonard Treman Apr 29 '22 at 02:14
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1I found the Mueller quote you may be referring to. "We use the words in a URL as a very very lightweight factor. And from what I recall this is primarily something that we would take into account when we haven't had access to the content yet." So it does seem like Google does take URL keywords into account, but maybe to a small degree or on a temporary basis. – Maximillian Laumeister Apr 29 '22 at 02:46
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1Yup in initial rankings. It does slightly improve user click rate too. If you do it across a several thousand page site it adds up. – Leonard Treman Apr 30 '22 at 03:33
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"On a google search, keywords are bolded" - this is done by a javascript decorating the page after it arrives in your browser (very simple to test for yourself) not by Google's ranking engine. – symcbean Oct 04 '23 at 15:03
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@Leonard Treman
– Zike Nov 13 '23 at 20:06The first is initial rankings. If you have human keywords in your url you will rank higher than an exact duplicate of the site with a long seemingly random url 1. I would say, this is your own thought, and I haven't found any evidence supporting it based on engineer from Google. 2. The word with bold means the word hits the keywords you are searching not because the word in the URL. 3. Again, I am talking about something with SEO. for me, I never input any long-URL manually in my browser.
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I really don't think it matters. The words below are from John Mueller at Google:
We use the words in a URL as a very very lightweight factor. And from what I recall this is primarily something that we would take into account when we haven't had access to the content yet. So if this is the absolute first time we see this URL we don't know how to classify its content, then we might use the words in the in the URL as something to help rank us better. But as soon as we've crawled and indexed the content there then we have a lot more information. And then that's something where essentially if the url is in German or in Japanese or in English it's pretty much the same thing.
With the development of AI I even think that the keywords don't matter to SEO.
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Do you think that it is better to have keywords in the URL or not? The answer from John Mueller would indicate that it is a factor.
I would say it is better to have the keywords because users are human and still read.
– keepkalm Oct 04 '23 at 15:19 -