Matt Cutts’s Advice On URLs & Page Names
While there are many important factors to “on page” optimization, most all optimization will start with the file name or page name - that’s of course after you’ve done your keyword homework. There are many nuggets of advice I myself could give on the subject by I thought in particular you might want to hear some of the things Matt Cutts (Google employee) has to say on the subject with regards to ranking in Google. Below I’ve compiled some key notes Matt has made on the subject from various sources.
- One type of file extension is not preferred over another.
This means .php is not preferred over .asp or .html over .htm. They all have equal value as far as Google is concerned.source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dont-end-your-urls-with-exe/
- Don’t end your URL in .exe or other extensions used mostly for binary data.
Ending your URLs with .exe or another ending commonly used for binary data may cause Google to not index the file or may cause other problems as it might think the URL is to an actual binary data file.source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dont-end-your-urls-with-exe/
- Use a dash instead of an underscore in file names.
Pretty self explanatory, Google seams to like the dash better as the underscore was used at one point in computer languages to depressant a combined word not two separate words. So in this case if you had the URL test_word.htm that could be interpreted as you use the word “test_word” in the URL not the words “test” and “word”.source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
- Google algorithm does not penalize for dashes in the URL.
There is no penalty for this but of course if you have a really long URL using this it might raise other flags.source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
- Use the same URL consistently across your entire site.
You do not want to vary the URL you are using across your site as this could be internated by Google as duplucate content. For example if you have your home page as yoursite.com/.index.html you want to use that all through your site and not vary this and have one link going to yoursite.com/ and other to yoursite.com/index.html.source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
- You should 301 redirect to default file names
Variations of default or common URLs should be 301 directed to one URL. For example if yoursite.com/, yoursite.com/index.htm, yoursite.com/index.html all go to the same place then you should 301 redirect them all to one of those URLs.source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
- A www and non-www version of your site can be treat differently
This is another issue with duplicate content and minimizing the chance of it. Google can treat a www and non-www URL as totally different pages. So you should make sure you are using only one of those in your links and possiably 301 redirect the one your not using to the one you are.source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonicalization-update/
- Google treats static and dynamic URLs in the same way.
Self explanatory, Google does not give static or dynamic URLs more weight over one or the other. But having keywords in the URL will currently give you an SEO advantage.source: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6860320126300142609
- Page Rank flows the same to static and dynamic.
Again pretty self explanatory, Google flows PR the same way to each of these types of URLs.source: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6860320126300142609
- Only try to use 2 or 3 parameters in dynamic URLs
Matt suggests only have about 2-3 parameters in your dynamic URLs.source: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6860320126300142609
- Try not to use numbers in dynamic URLs
It’s suggested that you don’t numbers in your URLs as they could be seen as session ids and confuse the Google bot when crawling your site.source: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6860320126300142609
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