Text in urls - case study

[FranticFish]

I have a site where for years the articles in the blog only used an ID. This was a site which has not had any link building for years. The content in the blog is not bad (although I say so myself). It's written to be read rather than to rank. It has never been promoted other than via the odd Tweet (from an account with 4K active users but one where it's very much a 'feed' so there is a lot of usage from people who are genuinely interested in the Tweets but who almost never interact). There is one article in the blog that goes in and out of fashion with Google. There are only around 70 articles in the blog, as I have been careful to keep the content discrete. It's evergreen content for the most part.

Five months ago I implemented a system whereby the urls became user friendly (i.e. they explain what the article is about).
I used canonical rather than 301. The preferred version is the user-friendly url, but the ID only is acceptable.
Google has indexed ALL articles under the new user friendly url so it clearly respects the canonical.

I think this blog is a pretty good case study for whether useful (i.e. text heavy) urls help as a direct ranking factor in and of themselves with nothing else going on, when compared to urls that just use IDs.

Absolutely zip. Like it never happened.

[lammert]

Thanks for sharing. Beside all the conspiracy theories floating around it is always nice to read someone's experience with real experimentation.

It's written to be read rather than to rank

In 2021, "written to be read" may well be one of the important factors to rank. Google puts more and more emphasis on signals coming from the end-user, rather than signals coming directly from the site owner. I am currently experimenting with just that approach.

[robzilla]

Sounds about right.

We use the words in a URL as a very very lightweight factor. And from what I recall this is primarily something that we would take into account when we haven't had access to the content yet. So if this is the absolute first time we see this URL we don't know how to classify its content, then we might use the words in the in the URL as something to help rank us better. But as soon as we've crawled and indexed the content there then we have a lot more information. And then that's something where essentially if the url is in German or in Japanese or in English it's pretty much the same thing.

Google: Words In A URL A Very Light Weight Factor But Less After Indexing [seroundtable.com]