Experiment 2 - The url - does it matter how it looks for the rankings?

In our first experiment we are working on the elements that are on the webpage - or document as it’s also called.

In this experiment we have a look at the second onpage-factor; the url - or address of the document.

What we want to prove right or wrong is the following: How much weight does the url get in the search results? Does it matter if it contains keywords or not?

The reason it is important to know this without any doubt is the fact that many of the content management systems out there are run in a state where the url’s does not contain any of the important search words for the page. The simply look like www.site.co.uk/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,347/Itemid,2/ instead of a readable url like www.site.co.uk/fruit/apples/red-delicious/

The experiment is performed in the same way as our previous experiment.

We use six different url’s for the test.

Document

1. Contains a humanly readable name.
2. Does not contain a humanly readable name.
3. Contains a ? in the url but contains a humanly readable name after the question mark.
4. Contains a ? in the url and no humanly readable name after the question mark.
5. Is a folder with the keyword as name of the folder.
6. Is a folder with the keyword in the middle of the name.

The body has a ≈1000 character text in all cases without the keyword in it.

All documents can be found from here.

Check the positions in Google or Yahoo or in Live.

To see the actual results, remove the numbers 123 from the end and hit search again.

The purpose of this test

What we are trying to prove in this test is what weight the url has when it comes to seo. We will regularly check the results in all three search engines, and see over time what factors are more important. Monthly we will update the findings we see so you can get a clear picture of what is the facts regarding these factors when it comes to onpage seo.

Results

08 March 2008:
This one actually surprised us a bit when we saw the results. Case 6 wins followed by 1 and 5. This means that having the searchword in the middle of other words in the url is better that having it alone followed by .html. It is also surprising that when then word is a folder alone it gets beaten by the two others. Case 3 and 4 shows very well how important it is to avoid url’s with a ? in it. They have not been cached in Google so far at all.