Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I would expect that Google would ignore overly stuffed URLs. Yet, I've seen it argued that these URLs are more descriptive and hence more usable.
I wouldn't put the keyword in the domain at all.
From what I have seen it doesn't help. I would work
more towards branding yourself rather than worrying about keywords in the domain name.
But then i have also seen this on the first page :
email-address-extractor-free-ware.htm
Regards,
Ashish T.
I wouldn't put the keyword in the domain at all.
From what I have seen it doesn't help. I would work
more towards branding yourself rather than worrying about keywords in the domain name
I agree that overuse of keywords in url is bad but I think that using 1 or 2 keywords in the URL is good for the following reason.
Although i dont believe it helps your ranking alone it does mean that people that link to the website with the url alone will passed the keyword. eg.
this is a great product : http://www.example.com/productkeyword.html
Google might not give an extra boost to pages with descriptive filenames, but if my own experience is any guide, it doesn't have anything against them.
Why would Google object to descriptive filenames
Simply correlation between "descriptive filenames" and page quality would answer this.
No doubt in my mind that this-URL-contains-keyword-stuffing.html vs quality is a negative correlation and thus google has every reason to negatively weight these pages.
In the last two years there has been a huge increase in spam sites using this type of url / page names and thus I would stay away from using it.
People here alway say that google will not do that because it will hurt the innocent. Google care about the big picture and the quality of their results. If it means hurting ranking for a few innocents to increase the quality of SERPS they will do it.
I'm #1 in Y (Yahoo), but hard to find on G (Google) for "widget wodget info". I rank #1 in G for related terms, and one day I'll rank in top 10 on G I'm sure. But I'm not exactly keyword stuffing, since the domain name is a generic term. But I deliberately made /pics.html and /photos.html type of pages, so I could rank high for "Widget Pics" and "Wodget Photos", and I do rock on those terms on Y and G and others. I've granted use to have my "widget photo" in people's publications, so it's good content. My technique qualifies, I think, as both keyword-stuffing and "simple-naming" at the same time. And it works for regular traffic, even when the main 3 word term is not on G's radar (yet!).
Y & G seem to add a low weighting/relevance towards clever-html-naming.
That said... my opinion is that mega-url-keyword stuffing is not the way to go... more than 2 or 3 words in the file name, but it could help if you try naturally naming pages. Instead of /article42.html I would go for /article-widget-history.html or /articles/widget-history.html ... or maybe /info/widget-history.html (i.e. people search for "info on widgets" more than "articles on widgets". But I don't do /music-widgets-download-mp3-history-free.html type of file names.
If your area is obscure, and you have unique content, then good use of keywords in the url should almost always get you the traffic that you deserve... /mona-lisa-paint-by-numbers.html vs. /article42.html - - I've done this type of renaming and seen it work for obscure terms.
SE's rank by more and more diverse factors, but unless you have an "authority" site (PR8 or higher), then you might find it helps to put 2-3 words in the url. Experiment and see.
People here alway say that google will not do that because it will hurt the innocent. Google care about the big picture and the quality of their results. If it means hurting ranking for a few innocents to increase the quality of SERPS they will do it.
I'm not saying that Google "won't do that because it will hurt the innocent." I'm saying that Google isn't likely to penalize descriptive filenames because the names make sense for reasons that have nothing to do with SEO, and because descriptive filenames have been around since long before Google, SEO, or search-engine spam were invented. (It's worth noting that Google uses descriptive ames for many of its own directories and pages.)
The other thing we need to remember is that the search engineers at Google are neither stupid nor simple-minded. Except for blatant examples of spam (cloaking or doorway pages, for example), factors that could indicate spam but don't necessarily indicate spam are unlikely to be considered in isolation.
Anchor text is a perfect example: How often do you hear of a site being penalized for the anchor text "Green Widgets" in a navigation menu? Probably never, because that's a natural use of the generic phrase. On the other hand, if 50 external sites linked to your Green Widgets page with the generic keyphrase "green widgets," Google might find that suspicious--and with good reason, since (in most cases) third-party sites would be expected to link to something like "Widgetco Green Widgets" or "Widgetco Green Widget Catalog" or something similar. (But then again, maybe Google would give you the benefit of the doubt, since--if you were 3M, for example--it would be only reasonable for lots of people to link to your Scotch tape page with the keyphrase "Scotch Tape.")
Then there's the issue of descriptive site names, titles, and headlines. Would you expect Google to penalize the Coca-Cola Corporation for having "Coca-Cola" in its domain name and homepage title?
I can't help thinking that people who obsess over Google penalties for this, that, or the other thing have what my mother used to call a "guilty conscience." If your pages aren't likely to raise eyebrows at Google during a manual review, your chances of being penalized are likely to be far less than your chances of losing rankings because of a random glitch in the algorithm or something else that you never thought of.
I'm not saying that Google "won't do that because it will hurt the innocent." I'm saying that Google isn't likely to penalize descriptive filenames because the names make sense for reasons that have nothing to do with SEO,
Wasn't referring to you EFV, just people here in general.
I take the following view on all my SEO:
If i took a random sample of sites that used the method in question (eg. keyword stuff in urls) then looked at the quality of those site would it be lower quality than a control (completely random) sample. If the quality would be lower than I wont use that method.
When i say keyword stuffing i am referring to urls like
www.keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.com/keyword4-keyword5/keyword6-keyword7-keyword8.htm
especially in regards to the overuse of the '-'
I believe if you took a sample of sites using this practice the quality is significant lower than a random sample and thus I wont use it.
I can't help thinking that people who obsess over Google penalties for this, that, or the other thing have what my mother used to call a "guilty conscience." If your pages aren't likely to raise eyebrows at Google during a manual review, your chances of being penalized are likely to be far less than your chances of losing rankings because of a random glitch in the algorithm or something else that you never thought of.
I didn't think we were referring to penalities. More so a negative impact on ranking. I am pedantic about every aspect of my sites. If something is possibly going to decrease ranking then i will not use it.
The sole aim of Google is to provide the best quality sites for any search. Thus IMO any aspect that is likely to make google believe you have a lower quality will decrease your rank.
[edited by: trimmer80 at 3:42 am (utc) on Aug. 2, 2005]
I don't think there's anything wrong with:
domain.com/green-widgets/reviews/talking-green-widget.html
Something more likely to arouse suspicion, IMHO, is:
domain.com/green-widgets-widget/reviews-review/ talking-green-widget-widgets-ratings-price-info.html
If it makes sense when you read it, then I think that's the way to go and it's not stuffing. If it's stuffing, it's stuffing, and an obscene amount of keywords and slightly unrelated but much searched for keywords is stuffing.
<off topic>
Is there any reason why DMOZ uses underscores instead of hyphens? I thought underscores were periods and hyphens were spaces.
</off topic>
[edited by: roldar at 3:39 am (utc) on Aug. 2, 2005]
I agree 99.9% And it's not worth the effort to come up with the .1% that could work. Build the brand name with good content, be wary of seo tricks and gimmicks that seem temporary or wrong, and your stuff will rank.
Does expedia or dell etc etc. etc. have their keywords in their domain? No. So you don't need to have it. If you want it o.k. if not o.k. It will not help either way. Google will not put any significance to it when it comes to looking at all the other variables.
The idea, I think, is to think about branding yourself long term.
Well named file/s are a very small plus, IMO, in SEO terms. But only small. Long gone are the days that the top ten listings are all kw-in-filename.htm. They're still there of course, but not much by virtue of the filenames counting a lot. My opinion anyway.
Nonetheless, if kw in filename contributes .2%, and it makes sense for the user, why not still do it. Heaven help us if we start feeling the need to *avoid* relevant kw's in filenames. Hehe.
Even if there's absolutely no + rank given to them, the fact that several search engines bold the search query keywords makes it something not to ignore.
Dell and other huge corporations don't have to think about this at all. When somebody wants a Dell or a Gateway they go directly to the website. Big players don't have to follow the rules the rest of us do because they have huge advertising budgets and branding campaigns. They effectively create their own industry; a Dell and a "desktop computer" are completely different things.
I think the big SE's are getting to the point finally where you can (read: should) make decisions based on what will make your site best for its visitors. I'm going to continue naming my pages green-flying-widgets.html, and all directories above it will be named appropriately and with keywords where it makes sense. I think most people would agree that, all fears and SEO aside, that's best for the user. Unless, of course, your URLs get to be way too long.
Does expedia or dell etc etc. etc. have their keywords in their domain? No. So you don't need to have it. If you want it o.k. if not o.k. It will not help either way. Google will not put any significance to it when it comes to looking at all the other variables.
My overall topic is in my domain name, but not for SEO reasons--it's just what the site is about.
Still, I can't help thinking that Google may pay some attention to domain names, if only because I know of one site that consistently ranks in the top one or two places for a two-word phrase that comprises the site's domain name--even though the site is actually about something else, doesn't use that two-word phrase in many places other than its URLs, and doesn't even have an especially high PageRank. (Think "bluewidgets.com" on a search for "blue widgets" when the site is about whatsits in Elbonia.)
so....it works for me to do this.
I have always (since 1997!) made the names of images in my Gallery meanful and structured since SEs have otherwise to guess the content from surrounding text (or *maybe* image comments or alt tags or titles or captions) at best.
I do this, and have always done this, to help users find stuff in SEs, NOT to game the SEs, and 90%+ of my traffic comes directly from the SEs, especially Google, and always has done so.
So I don't think it hurts at all if it is not artificial. If it is artificial then I guess the PhhDs at G et al will be trying to detect and ignore it.
However, my image names may now appear to be keyword-stuffed given that black-hat keyword-stuffing has been invented, so I may yet end up caught in the crossfire. We shall see.
Rgds
Damon
Amateur websites do this *all the time*. It wouldn't hurt just a few innocents. And, in fact it would tend to decease the quality of the SERPs. Non-spam amateur sites using keywords in URL get forced down in the SERPs because they use URLs that actually make sense.
