Are Friendly URLs and Sitemaps Worth It?
February 27th, 2008The Google Webmaster Central Blog has in recent weeks provided some clarity and best practices on a few of the current mainstream SEO issues that many enterprises are struggling with, including the value of friendly URLs and Sitemaps. While friendly URLs are almost inherent to modern Web applications like WordPress blogs, they can be very difficult to implement in complex enterprise Web applications and especially ones that integrate older apps. Sitemaps pose the same challenge. When is it worth converting to friendly URLs or to develop the functionality to create dynamic Sitemaps?
Here are my key take-aways from the info revealed on the Webmaster Central Blog:
1) Subdomains and subdirectories. They claim that there’s no difference as far as Google is concerned between subdomains and subdirectories. So hypothetically a page under iphone.apple.com is considered equal in Google’s eyes to a page under apple.com/iphone. I thought that one should have an advantage over the other, but after thinking about it I couldn’t find a reasonable advantage for either and so to me their claim makes sense.
2) Underscores vs. dashes in URLs. For now, dashes are better, but Google is getting better at differentiating words and punctuation so in time it will be less important.
3) Friendly URLs matter. Keywords in URLs DO matter, but something interesting that I learned today was that to meet the technical requirements for Google News, URLs have to contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. So it seems that a good URL strategy is to make it friendly, but to append a unique content/article/post ID to the end. That’s definitely true if your content is newsworthy!
4) Sitemaps don’t really matter that much. That is as long as your site has good navigation and Google is able to find all your content easily otherwise.
To me it’s a relief to know that sitemaps aren’t such a big deal, because creating sitemaps for complex Web sites IS a big deal. It is better to rather focus on the navigation and usability of a Web site.