When building a website and adding content, the most important thing is to focus on making it easy for people to use first, and not just search engines. Google’s ranking system is designed to prioritise content that’s useful and reliable. Trying to trick Google’s algorithms or manipulate SEO can actually hurt your rankings, so it’s best to stick to the basics. Here are some simple tips to help you create better URLs for your website.
Best practices to create URL structure for SEO
What website owners should do:
- Use descriptive URLs that tell site visitors and Google something about what the page is about. URLs that contain random numbers or symbols will not be helpful for people or search engines.
- Use hyphens to separate words in your URLs to help both users and Google identify the concepts in the URL more easily. You should avoid using underscores or combining words in the URL.
- Consider using a country-specific domain or subdirectory if your website is multi-regional. This will make it easier for Google to geotarget your site.
- Avoid creating URLs that change every time the page loads. This is especially important if your website contains videos, as Google will not be able to process and index videos with constantly changing URLs.
- Avoid using non-ASCII characters in the URL.
- Do not use unreadable or long ID numbers in the URL.
- Do not use fragments to change the content of a page. These are not generally supported by Google. If you are using Javascript to change the content, the History API should be used instead.
Additional considerations for complex websites
If your website is particularly large or complex, you may need to follow some additional best practices:
- Google can use directories to learn how frequently URLs are updated. This will help Google determine how often to crawl those directories. For example, a website with directories for policies and promotions may update the content on those pages at different frequencies.
- If your site has the same content on multiple URLs, Google will try to choose a single canonical URL to show in search results. Make sure each piece of content on your site can only be accessed through one URL. If you have multiple pages that have the same information, you should try to set up a redirect from non-preferred URLs to a preferred canonical URL.
Potential issues and solutions
If your website has an overly complex URL structure that includes many parameters, it could create an unnecessarily high number of URLs that have duplicate or similar content. This can cause issues for Google crawlers. Googlebot may use too much bandwidth or be unable to completely index your content. To avoid issues with URL structure, you should create a simple URL structure. You should also consider using a robots.txt file to block Googlebot from accessing problematic URLs.
Wherever possible, avoid using session IDs in your URLs, and use cookies instead. If your website server treats upper and lower case text in a URL the same, convert all the text to the same case so Google can more easily determine that the URLs are for the same page.
You should also shorten your URLs whenever possible by getting rid of any unnecessary parameters. If your website has an infinite calendar, use a nofollow attribute for links to dynamically created future pages. And finally, make sure to check your site for broken relative links.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that there is no single right way to create the perfect URL structure for SEO. The best approach will vary depending on the specific website and the goals you want to achieve.
