There’s been a longstanding discussion on whether keywords in your URL matter for SEO or whether your URL matters at all. Conventional wisdom states the following:
* Have your URL match your post title
* Have at least your desired keywords in your URL
* Keep your URL shorter than 140 characters
* Consider taking out conjunction words such as: and, or, but, yet, nor, for, so
As you can gather from my previous posts on SEO, I really don’t think SEO matters beyond the basics. The basics include a searchable title, filling out the meta description, writing unique relevant content around your keywords, and perhaps having keywords in your URL.
After a recent analysis, I’m not so sure.
AN EXAMPLE OF WHERE YOUR URL DOESN’T MATTER
On January 12, 2012 I wrote a post entitled, “How To Save More For Retirement If You Don’t Make Much.” The post is roughly 2,150 words long with two proprietary charts and some sound advice on retirement savings strategies.
There’s a funny thing that happens in WordPress if you start writing the post without writing the title first. WordPress will randomly assign you a URL number instead of repeat the phrase of your title. After I wrote my first paragraph, I then went and put in the title at which point WP created the following URL: http://www.financialsamurai.com/2012/01/12/24402/. Oops.
Only after I published the post did I realize, crap, I didn’t optimize my URL title. I thought about changing the URL immediately after publishing, but I later decided what the hell. Comments were already coming in aggressively as the post was widely shared over social media.
It turns out that this post on saving for retirement was one of the most commented on posts of all 2012 published posts with 181 comments. Furthermore, the post itself had over 40,000 views in 2012. The post wasn’t in the top 5 most viewed posts on Financial Samurai for 2012, but all in all, it did quite well with a URL of “/24402.”
SEO MESSY-O
If what the SEOs say is true, my post should do poorly in the highly competitive search field of saving money for retirement. Shoot, who doesn’t want to save more money for a better retirement? Here are the following rankings for my post if you type in the phrase: “How to save more for retirement”
Google: Front Page #12
Yahoo: Front Page #6
Bing: Front Page #5
DuckDuckGo: Front Page #1
So what’s going on here? The only thing I can see is that quality of content, length of content, uniqueness of content with the charts, and social media signals trump a “bad” URL /24402. The search engines are smart enough to look beyond the URL to assess the meat of the post.
Search engines are getting smarter every day as teams of engineers work to make their algorithms better. Search results must find the best content at any given moment otherwise a user will easily use another. Who wants to read another thin eHow article written by someone who isn’t a specialist on what they are writing about? Nobody.
CONCLUSION
I can’t say definitively that URLs don’t matter for SEO given I’ve just got one specific datapoint. Maybe my retirement savings post would have received even more traffic if it had a better URL. However, I’ve got probably hundreds of posts on Financial Samurai and Yakezie.com which would probably be frowned upon such “SEO Experts.” Yet, traffic continues to do well.
If there’s a choice between creating a URL that makes sense vs. a URL full of garble, obviously go for the one that has your keywords. However, if you mess up your URL like I did, it’s not the end of the world. It might not even matter at all! Just make sure your content is something nobody has ever seen before. After that, promote your article and hope for the best.
START A MONEY MAKING BLOG
It’s been around six years since I started Financial Samurai and Yakezie and I’m actually earning a good passive and active income stream online now. The online income stream has allowed me to pursue other more interesting things, such as consulting for various financial tech startups, traveling around the world, and spending more time with family.
I never thought I’d be able to quit my job in 2012 just three years after starting Financial Samurai. But by starting one financial crisis day in 2009, Financial Samurai actually makes more than my entire passive income total that took 15 years to build. If you enjoy writing, creating, connecting with people online, and enjoying more freedom, see how you can set up a WordPress blog in 15 minutes with Bluehost. You never know where the journey will take you in 2015 and beyond!
Regards,
Sam
It’s one of those things where you really don’t know. What if you had included a ‘normal’ URL, whose to say it wouldn’t have gotten even more hits? Maybe you really were punished but didn’t know because it performed pretty good anyways.
I’d lean to saying no, it probably doesn’t matter. I think content matters more than anything else, but I also think it has to count for *something*
Interesting to think about anyways.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t matter. It’s definitely a piece to the puzzle, how large a piece however, is anyone’s guess.
I’ll go with content,length and substance; the SEO may be important but not the primary driving force.
Interesting. You and I had this conversation a couple months ago, and you were on the other side, looking at optimizing URLs. I think search engines getting smarter is a great innovation. If I can avoid spammy, keyword-ridden articles on nothing during my search, I’m a happy camper.
Hmmm, I forget our conversation. I’m sure I thought having good keywords in your URL mattered, but after looking at the statistics for my retirement post, I’m not so sure.
I have spent a lot of time over the past couple years understanding SEO given all the Google massacres. Yet, it keeps on coming back to basic content and that’s it.
I sincerely hope not – on behalf of everyone on this earth in love with weird acronyms in their domain names.
Me too, but better to have something logical in the URL and Title first, and then start messing around!
My basic message is, if one makes a “mistake” don’t worry too much! Work on the content.
My food blog is If You Can Read, You Can Cook and the domain is ifyoucanread.com. Yeah, I managed to use the half of my blog name that doesn’t contain any keywords relevant to my site! Considering how little SEO I’ve done on that site, my growth has been pretty good.
Nice! I’m far from an expert, but finding titles that people are searching for is beneficial. You mentioned quality and length of content. For a while, I got caught up in writing for the sake of writing. I wouldn’t diminish my writing too much, but I am willing to admit I’ve refocused on writing high quality less often (since my time is so pressed).
A little SEO helps… and 6 months ago, I didn’t know anything about SEO. I felt like I missed out on many opportunities. It’s a fine balance it seems.
Work on those Whale Posts Doc! It’ll help in search the most for the long run.
Very interesting. It seems that search engines pay less relevance to known SEO tactics and more to the quality of content. It makes sense as search engine’s prime job is to provide quality content to its readers. Period!
I think this is a relief if you blow your url for a post, but it would seem obvious that having a descriptive one still would generate more traffic. The question I have is whether it makes sense to change a URL once the post is published. Your thoughts?
Very interesting. I would have thought that between all those SEO tool makers out there, one of them (maybe SEOMoz) should be able to tell us what kind of impact this has. I also thought it was a major component of SEO but I guess we were wrong.
I’m guessing that the article still ranked high because you have ton of “authority” on the web. You’re well read, heavily trafficked and well engaged in conversation with your visitors.
I would be curious what the impact of a bad URL would be on a much smaller time blog like mine. I’m going to guess that until I build “authority” and “trust” in Google a mistake like that could be devastating.
The only way to tell is to do an experiment and give it a go!
I’m still fairly new to blogging, being that my blog is less than a year old – but there is something in google that heavily values length of the article. All my articles are over a 1000 words, but the few posts over 2000 words do very well compared to the others. It would be interesting to see how they do once my page rank improves. I think length trumps the URL title.
Just the other day I realized I goofed the URL on one of my posts after I published it and I was thinking “oh maaan” I’m glad that it’s not that big of a deal! I usually try to match my title to the URL when I remember though. Intriguing analysis on your post search results across different browsers Sam.
Use your keywords in the headings and make sure the first level (<H1>) includes your most important keywords. Never duplicate your title tag content in your header tag.
If you can make your URL matter, then why not go at it and give your best shot? Every online marketer wants to have an edge on anything and everyone so why not utilize every detail that can give you a boost?
I feel like this is inconclusive because (like many things in life) you can’t honestly know what would have happened otherwise. So you had a solid, well-received post with a bad URL that ranked #12 on Google. What would have happened if it had a good URL? Would it still be ranked #12 or would it be #3? We will never know the answer to this!
My point is for everyone to stop worrying about the nitty gritty. Search engines find the way to find content. Let’s focus on good content, and less time on SEO and the SEO industry.
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Whatever works for the users, works for search engines. and the urls does help a bit with user experience so i care about them but not to the point of making exact same as the keyword.