Googler Says Keywords In URLs Have Minimal Impact Once Content Is Indexed
https://www.seroundtable.com? ?
Back in the day, I have seen first hand that having the keyword in the URL did help with ranking and I have worked with that assumption ever since. Now someone asked John on twitter
Hey @JohnMu – site in French is being told they have to change all URLs to English even though the pages are in French. Any Google concerns for French-speaking searchers?
— Mark Traphagen ✊??️? (@marktraphagen) August 18, 2020
@JohnMu Sorry not what I was asking. Site is in French. They want to use English URLs. Would this cause any SEO problems for them for French speakers searching in French?
— Mark Traphagen ✊??️? (@marktraphagen) August 19, 2020
To which John replied
The SEO effect of keywords in the URL is minimal once the content is indexed. Make URLs that work for your users, not for SEO. Also, changing URLs on an existing site is a site-migration & it will take time/fluctuations to be reprocessed, so I'd avoid that unless it's critical.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) August 19, 2020
So what does that mean? This is for an existing site, perhaps he was referring to the fact that that the small advantage you get with keywords in the URL might be offset by the fact you will have to tell Google to reindex the new pages and pass the value from those old ones to the new ones and a million things can go wrong when you do a migration.
I would still consider this as something worth exploring while auditing the site because which would you rather see in the SERPs
- example.com/blue-widget
- example.com/62-6c-75-65-2d-77-69-64-67-65-74-20 ?
but then again with Chrome and Firefox looking to kill off the URL, no URLs might creep into the SERPs as well.
