This is the second of three posts covering our presentations at SMX East last week.
URLs are the foundation of the Internet. However, they can cause some significant problems for search engines due to the number of synonyms that are often automatically created for each piece of content.
If there was only one thing I wanted the audience to take away from this presentation, it was that they should always create short, descriptive URLs, and redirect all common synonyms to one chosen form. (See this article on canonicalization for more information.) This will help search engines more efficiently crawl and index your site.
Another interesting statistic from this session is something that Sean Suchter from Yahoo! provided — all other things being equal, a searcher is twice as likely to click a short URL than they are to click a long URL.
Please use the comments to ask us any further questions about URLs or domains and we'll update the post with the answers. Here's the presentation:
-- Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Team
