Thread

Hello,

A client of mine lately pointed out someone said that the category’s in the url could have a negative effect on the Search engines. I am speaking of something like this: http://www.mysite.com/index.php/weblog/c3/

Is that true?

From what I understand it all depends on what you’re going after. 

I’m still getting into expression engine so I might be off on the inner workings of EE, but if use one of your site keywords as a category segment it will *could* help you.  The thinking can go 2 ways:

- put your keywords in the URL (including segments) in the effort that google will place your site (higher) in its search result page for that keyword.  Having your keywords in the URL can effect your rankings either way.  How much? No one really knows; 
- putting too many characters, especially phrases that are nonsense (ie…the c3 your example above), can dilute the URL and make your keywords less relevant.  You can also put too many keywords in the URL and have google penalize you for url keyword stuffing.

Generally, I would just make sure that, if you can, put the keywords from your URL segments somewhere in your body text.  It’s all about showing relevance as anyone can put words in a URL.  Will the c3 hurt your rankings? It depends on a lot of things including the competition of the search term(keyword). 

If you client is that concerned with SEO then I would suggest they do things that are far more important to improving their ranking than worrying about URL segments.  Have them get link from other sites to theirs (this is one of the biggest factors in rankings), create new content, and many other things that (i feel) google sees as far more important to search ranking.

And just because a keyword is in our URL doesn’t mean you’ll rank for it.  In fact, you can rank for keywords that aren’t even on your site if eough people use it as anchor text for incoming links.  George W Bush’s website ranked for “miserable failure” because enough people used “miserable failure” as anchor text for links to his website.

SEO is an art and there aren’t any definitive guides. 

Hope this helps a little

Kevin

It isn’t going to have a negative effect, but I’d still recommend using the category name in the url rather than c3, c4, etc.

admin->global weblog preferences->Use Category URL Titles In Links.

Ok, Thanks for this great feedback! I will make sure not to use the standard segments anymore. But for this site I will keep them anyway 😊

What soxhead said! Basically, if your category name contains useful keywords, it’s good to have them in your URLs.

That said, I don’t think a URL of example.com/C14/ would have a MASSIVE negative impact on SEO (assuming the page is full of spiffy content and makes good use of title, H1 etc) but it all helps.

Aside from the use of keyword v.v. c1-x etc in the URL, it also may be that this person is referring to duplicate content penalties.

I haven’t seen your set-up, but usually categories are used like filters so a category URL will list content displayed elsewhere too. If this is the case you may want to look at blocking search engine index of one or the other depending on which is more important to you and your search engine strategy.

I don’t personally know whether or not such a penalty (if it were applied) is likely to really be a big deal or not though. Might be worth asking about in an SEO forum.