There has been a lot of talking back and forth about whether or not it is worthwhile to load up website URLs with keywords or to clean it up. One side of the argument says that yes, of course it is worthwhile – why not jam more keywords into the equation to funnel searchers your way? On the other side of this debate, conservative webmasters worry about whether this practice is penalized by Google for being spam.
So what is the final ruling?
In 2008, Google confirmed that clean URLs are not required in a site’s architecture in order for the site to be crawled successfully. The matter is slightly more complicated, though.
While it usually isn’t worthwhile to tear down an entire website’s structure to clean up URLs, sloppy URLs usually indicate problems elsewhere. If you have decided that a significant SEO overhaul is in order, then it is often advisable to start by giving your URLs a scrub so that they are more search-friendly.
Do clean, keyword-rich URLs boost my Google SERPS?
This is a reasonable question, since you are making use of the keywords that your blog and on-site content is working hard to rank with. It seems like replacing URL jargon with relevant keywords would give your ranking a boost, but in reality the change is virtually imperceptible. This does start to make more of an impact when forum users link to your website, since their forum posts now effectively contain your desired keywords in an anchor link that leads to your site.
If you are banking on forum linking to boost your keyword rankings, then you should try to trim away unnecessary stop-words so that your URL is brimming with important keywords as the page title. This is important because many forums will compress a URL automatically to shorten it.
As a standard practice, try to use clean search engine-friendly URLS whenever possible, and try to keep your URLs as simple and keyword-heavy as possible. This will eliminate the risk of Googlebot crawlers giving upon your URLs and deeming them unimportant, however small it may be!
For more information on how to manage your URLs and eliminate the risk of bad links, visit our bad links removal page using our squeaky-clean URL – visit https://www.360businesslocal.com/services/bad-links-removal/ now!