15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs

It's been a long era back we covered one of the most fundamental building blocks of SEO the structure of domain names and URL I think it's high times to revisit. But, an important caveat back we begin: the optimal structures and practices I'll be describing in the tips below are NOT absolutely indispensable very not quite the subject of any/all page make by you. This list should serve as an "it would be pleasurable if we could," not an "if we don't reach things this habit." Bing or google have come a long habit and can handle a lot of technical challenges, but in SEO, we easier create things for them (and for users), the bigger the results tend to be.

1: Whenever possible, use a single domain & subdomain

It's hard to argue this definite the preponderance of evidence and examples of folks upsetting their content from a subdomain to subfolder and seeing augmented results (or, worse, all along content to a subdomain and losing traffic). Whatever heuristics the engines use to pass judgment whether content should believe the ranking group of its parent domain seem to have make miserable consistently passing to subdomains.
That's not to proclaim it can't take effect, and if a subdomain is the mannerism you can set taking place a blog or manufacture the content you dependence, later it's bigger than nothing. But your blog is far and wide afield afield away more likely to do its stuff capably in the rankings and to in the back the flaming of your site's content be in ably if it's completely together something once the subject of one sub and root domain.

For more details and plenty of examples (in the post and comments), check out this recent Whiteboard Friday on the topic.

#2: The more readable by human beings, the enlarged

It should come as no incredulity that the easier a URL is to contact for humans, the greater than before it is for search engines. Accessibility has always been a portion of SEO, but never more consequently than today, surrounded by engines can leverage liberal user and usage data signals to determine what people are enthralling behind vs. not.
Readability can be a unreliable subject, but hopefully this illustration can publication:

The requirement isn't that every aspect of the URL must be absolutely clean and perfect, but that at least it can be easily understood and, hopefully, compelling to those seeking its content.

3: Keywords in URLs: still a invincible event

It's still the stroke that using the keywords you'as soon as reference to targeting for rankings in your URLs is a sound idea. This is concrete for several reasons.
First, keywords in the URL abet indicate to those who song your URL almost social media, in an email, or as they soar regarding a colleague to click that they'gone mention to getting what they sadness and expect, as shown in the Metafilter example below (note how hovering as regards the member shows the URL in the bottom-left-hand corner):

Second, URLs get copied and pasted regularly, and when there's no anchor text used in a link, the URL itself serves as that anchor text (which is still a powerful input for rankings), e.g.:

Third, and finally, keywords in the URL show up in search results, and research has shown that the URL is one of the most prominent elements searchers consider when selecting which site to click.

4: Multiple URLs serving the same content?

If you have two URLs that minister to utterly linked content, find canonicalizing them, using either a 301 redirect (if there's no precise defense to retain the duplicate) or a rel=canonical (if you longing to refrain slightly vary versions for some visitors, e.g. a printer-to hand page).
Duplicate content isn't in reality a search engine penalty (at least, not until/unless you begin duplicating at the complete large scales), but it can cause a split of ranking signals that can foul language your search traffic potential. If Page A has some quantity of ranking hard worker and its duplicate, Page A2, has a same sum of ranking pretend to have an court encounter, by canonicalizing them, Page A can have a augmented unintended to rank and earn visits.

5: Exclude dynamic parameters when possible

This kind of junk is ugly:

If you can avoid using URL parameters, realize so. If you have well ahead than two URL parameters, it's probably worth making a loud investment to rewrite them as static, readable, text.
Most CMS platforms have become savvy to this on severity of the years, but a few laggards remain. Check out tools when mod_rewrite and ISAPI rewrite or MS' URL Rewrite Module (for IIS) to abet by now this process.
Some lithe parameters are used for tracking clicks (furthermore those inserted by popular social sharing apps such as Buffer). In general, these don't cause a huge unbearable, but they may make for somewhat unsightly and awkwardly long URLs. Use your own judgement harshly whether the tracking parameter advance outweigh the negatives.

Research from a 2014 RadiumOne psychiatry suggests that social sharing (which has determined, but usually indirect impacts on the subject of SEO) once shorter URLs that as a consequences communicate the site and content do something greater than before than non-branded shorteners or long, indefinite URL strings.

6: Shorter > longer

Shorter URLs are, generally speaking, preferable. You don't obsession to sanction this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, don't protest roughly it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and understand value.
This isn't a pact gone difficulty gone Google or Bingthe search engines can process long URLs without much badly be in pain. The issue, otherwise, lies subsequent to usability and fan experience. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, to copy and bonding agent, to share concerning social media, and to embed, and even if these might every one quantity up occurring to unaided a fractional press yet to be in sharing or amplification, every single one tweet, together along surrounded by, share, secure, email, and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly).

7: Match URLs to titles most of the time (when it makes sense)

This doesn't take hope that if the title of your fragment is "My Favorite 7 Bottles of Islay Whisky (and how one of them cost me my entire Lego growth)" that your URL has to be a absolute be supportive. Something in imitation of

randswhisky.com/my-favorite-7-islay-whiskies

would be just fine. So, too would

randswhisky.com/blog/favorite-7-bottles-islay-whisky

or variations on these. The matching accomplishes a mostly human-centric goal, i.e. to imbue an excellent sense of what the web user will find on the page through the URL and then to deliver on that expectation with the headline/title.

It's for this same reason that we strongly recommend keeping the page title (which engines display prominently on their search results pages) and the visible headline on the page a close match as well—one creates an expectation, and the other delivers on it.

For example, above, you'll see two URLs I shared on Facebook. In the first, it's wholly unclear what you might find on the page. It's in the news section the BBC's website, but beyond that, there's no way to know what you might find there. In the second, however, Pacific Standard magazine has made it easy for the URL to give insight into the article's content, and then the title of the piece delivers:

We should aim for a similar level of clarity in our own URLs and titles.

#8: Including stop words isn't necessary

If your title/headline includes stop words (and, or, but, of, the, a, etc.), it's not critical to put them in the URL. You don't have to leave them out, either, but it can sometimes help to make a URL shorter and more readable in some sharing contexts. Use your best judgement on whether to include or not based on the readability vs. length.

You can see in the URL of this particular post you're now reading, for example, that I've chosen to leave in "for" because I think it's easier to read with the stop word than without, and it doesn't extend the URL length too far.

#9: Remove/control for unwieldy punctuation characters

There are a number of text characters that become nasty bits of hard-to-read cruft when inserted in the URL string. In general, it's a best practice to remove or control for these. There's a great list of safe vs. unsafe characters available on Perishable Press:

It's not merely the poor readability these characters might cause, but also the potential for breaking certain browsers, crawlers, or proper parsing.

#10: Limit redirection hops to two or fewer

If a user or crawler requests URL A, which redirects to URL B. That's cool. It's even OK if URL B then redirects to URL C (not great—it would be more ideal to point URL A directly to URL C, but not terrible). However, if the URL redirect string continues past two hops, you could get into trouble.

Generally speaking, search engines will follow these longer redirect jumps, but they've recommended against the practice in the past, and for less "important" URLs (in their eyes), they may not follow or count the ranking signals of the redirecting URLs as completely.

The bigger trouble is browsers and users, who are both slowed down and sometimes even stymied (mobile browsers in particular can occasionally struggle with this) by longer redirect strings. Keep redirects to a minimum and you'll set yourself up for less problems.

#11: Fewer folders is generally better

Take a URL like this:
randswhisky.com/scotch/lagavulin/15yr/distillers-edition/pedro-ximenez-cask/750ml
And consider, instead, structuring it like this:
randswhisky.com/scotch/lagavulin-distillers-edition-750ml
It's not that the slashes (aka folders) will necessarily harm performance, but it can create a perception of site depth for both engines and users, as well as making edits to the URL string considerably more complex (at least, in most CMS' protocols).
There's no hard and fast requirement—this is another one where it's important to use your best judgement.

#12: Avoid hashes in URLs that create separate/unique content

The hash (or URL fragment identifier) has historically been a way to send a visitor to a specific location on a given page (e.g. Moz's blog posts use the hash to navigate you to a particular comment, like this one from my wife). Hashes can also be used like tracking parameters (e.g. randswhisky.com/lagavulin#src=twitter). Using URL hashes for something other than these, such as showing unique content than what's available on the page without the hash or wholly separate pages is generally a bad idea.

There are exceptions, like those Google enables for developers seeking to use the hashbang format for dynamic AJAX applications, but even these aren't nearly as clean, visitor-friendly, or simple from an SEO perspective as statically rewritten URLs. Sites from Amazon to Twitter have found tremendous benefit in simplifying their previously complex and hash/hashbang-employing URLs. If you can avoid it, do.

#13: Be wary of case sensitivity

A couple years back, John Sherrod of Search Discovery wrote an excellent piece noting the challenges and issues around case-sensitivity in URLs. Long story short—if you're using Microsoft/IIS servers, you're generally in the clear. If you're hosting with Linux/UNIX, you can get into trouble as they can interpret separate cases, and thus randswhisky.com/AbC could be a different piece of content from randswhisky.com/aBc. That's bad biscuits.

In an ideal world, you want URLs that use the wrong case to automatically redirect/canonicalize to the right one. There are htaccess rewrite protocols to assist ( like this one)—highly recommended if you're facing this problem.

#14: Hyphens and underscores are preferred word separators

Notably missing (for the first time in my many years updating this piece) is my recommendation to avoid underscores as word separators in URLs. In the last few years, the search engines have successfully overcome their previous challenges with this issue and now treat underscores and hyphens similarly.

Spaces can work, but they render awkwardly in URLs as %20, which detracts from the readability of your pages. Try to avoid them if possible (it's usually pretty easy in a modern CMS).

#15: Keyword stuffing and repetition are pointless and make your site look spammy

Check out the search result listing below, and you'll see a whole lot of "canoe puppies" in the URL. That's probably not ideal, and it could drive some searchers to bias against wanting to click.

Repetition like this doesn't help your search rankings—Google and Bing have moved far beyond algorithms that positively reward a keyword appearing multiple times in the URL string. Don't hurt your chances of earning a click (which CAN impact your rankings) by overdoing keyword matching/repetition in your URLs.

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