Google's New Guidelines on URL Structure From Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts spoke live from WordCamp 2007, and let us all in on some things Google has changed about our URLs.
The focal point of Matt's presentation is that Google will view underscore in URLs and words separators going forward. Google used to see "seo_news" as "seonews", but no more. I can see where this is a big deal for long tail URLs. I think it adds a user readability to long, keyword rich, and descriptive URLs, especially for Blogs. It really isn't necessary for any other reason. Google has always seen those keywords, if webmasters dared to put them there. For example I get credit for keyword SEO in http://www.seocog.com/. So people who use long hyphenated URLs are doing so unnecessarily. Like "buy-new-dvds-.whatever", the same keyword credit would be given for "buynewdvds.whatever". I think users tend to mess up, and dislike hyphenated and underscored URLs. Especially at the Domain level....they are hard to remember and type in.
Matt also touched on dynamic URLs and how Google has changed the algorithm to afford the changes. URLs with characters such as "?", and "=" will now be processed the same as static URLs, as long as there are not too many (more than 3) special characters.
Another cool change is that now Google doesn't care how many slashes (directories) in a URL. This will cut down on Sub Domains and allow webmasters a deep rich file directory. My only caution here is that the deeper the directory, the less likely it is to be crawled effectively. Additionally MSN and Yahoo still dislike this very much, but wait a few weeks....monkey see monkey do!
Google has also tossed out the issues they have had with alternative file extensions for URLs. Extensions such as .php, .htm, .html, .asp, .aspx, and even .jsp will all be acceptable extensions now. Serving up the same results as any other extension.
In closing Matt offered the audience of Bloggers this tip when he was asked how to get a Blog on Google News....He stated that having more than one author is a big factor, so group Blogging is a new "HOT" item from Google.
I have said for some time now, that group and community content is very big with Google. Yahoo doesn't seem to care much, nor MSN. I think we will be looking for Yahoo to follow suit in some way on these measures in their next update.
Peace and SEO
Baby
**We Require a Link Back Please.
2 Comments:
Anonymous, I consider this comment to be fairly off topic and irrelevant to the post you commented on....However I found your writing style and story to be quite humorous and intelligent, so i published it anyways. Next time you drop a link, please use a name so i may at least address you properly. :p
Thanks
Baby
Blogs are good for every one where we get lots of information for any topics... nice job keep it up !!!
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