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
I generally use .htaccess for URL rewrite.
Wouldn't it be enough or should I do something else too?
Thanks.
When you are referring to PageRank, are you saying that Microsoft are using Google's PageRank algorithm?
Google's PageRank......i hate it
@Keral Patel - .htacess files are a great solution. For more info on Canonicalization and the .htacess look at Slide 22 in the architecting navigation section of this presentation: http://janeandrobot.com/admin/Pages/web20presentations.html.
@Ian M - Live Search uses an algorithm that is very similar to Google's PageRank, but we call it StaticRank. Yahoo does as well, but I can never remember what they call it. Generally we use the terms interchangeably because most people don't know what StaticRank is.
@SEO - come on... even I'm big enough to admit that PageRank is brilliant - not perfect, but better than I would have come up with.
Does it important to new site? I don't use it.
Great work guys. This data will help me when building and growing my site. Keep it up!
@ Nathan_Buggia. When will there be a toolbar / site where the actual 'ranking' of separate pages can be viewed?
Creating short URLs is beautiful even if not for the search engines, but for humans. But sometimes it's a big challenge when a web developer uses a server side scripting language like PHP. This said, I normally use Apache Mod rewrite to rewrite all the URLs to make them search engine-friendly, shorter and easy to remember.
Short URLs make it easy for humans and search engines to remember. And I bear that in mind while creating web pages. But it might be difficult for someone developing with server side languages and knows little or no MOD rewrite techniques.
very thanks for article...
Great article.
