Many search engine optimisation professionals have often been asked the question, are short URLs or long URLs better for SEO?
Research has found that shorter URLs have a much higher click through rate as they are easier for users to decipher. Longer URLs which pass too much information within the URL tend to dilute the optimisation for that page, as too many words are passed in the URL.
Ideally all URLs on the site should be as descriptive as possible whilst still being easily understandable by your users. Long URLs written by CMS programs will only confuse your users, and could lead to fewer clicks.
In addition using relevant keywords within the URL will further optimise the products to the search engines, and will be displayed in bold on a search query. This will help improve rankings and click through rates.
Paul
SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
Duplicate content is a big issue in search engine optimisation, at Just Search we always try to remove potential duplicate content from our clients websites either beeing from different pages/versions within the website, from other domains owned by the client or other external sources such as syndicated content, directories descriptions, press releases, etc.
Having said that, Google’s senior engineer Matt Cutts posted an article in his blog which implies that whitehat webmasters should not worry too much about duplicate content on their own site:
I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it’s helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site.
He also states that it is probably not wise to syndicate content that is already on your website, as it makes it more difficult for Google to determine how much of a website’s content is original vs syndicated. And suggests:
My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content.
That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.
Certainly it’s good to know that Google’s duplicate content system is somewhat flexible, my advice however is to avoid duplicate content both on-site or off-site at all costs.
Tino
SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
