Friendly URL

[xtremeoff-road]

Could I trouble you SEO gurus to take a look at this thread for example...

http://www.utvwire.com/content/The-Lounge/23/Hey-Honda-Where-Are-You-/

We have formatted our URLs to be "friendlier"

My question is...is this really that beneficial to have them like this?

Is there any harm in having these Friendly URLs, could it damamge the rank of a site??

Thanks in advance for your time!!

 

[Keral_Patel]

Yes they look very nice. I would have done the same if I was the owner of that forum.

It cannot hurt rankings but help you in targeting those keywords that would now be used in the URL itself.

Yes there is one side effect. And that is that if you already have many pages cached in the search engine index they will slowly decrease and all this new URL's will be indexed in place of the older ones. So there might be fluctuations for sometime.

Max you can do from your side is to generate a sitemap for your site now and submit it to the google's webmaster account under sitemaps.

Other thing to drive the bots crazy would be to hit some High PR and Relevant links for the site itself and some of the inner pages.

 

[xtremeoff-road]

Thanks Nick, actually I have a sitemap generator that pings google and sends the map over...

So you think this might be good to do on my live site, even though there are a lot of pages indexed in the search engines eventually they will be replaced with the friendly URLs...right?

Thanks a lot Nick!

 

[Keral_Patel]

Yes. Its not that big site. I checked it out. So you will not be having much problems with it.

I assume you have sitemap generator and it pings google. But have you opened your webmaster account and submitted that sitemap in it? It does have some other good features that can be available from the control panel of it.

 

[xtremeoff-road]

Hey Nick, I was going to take it live on atvwire.com not utvwire.com

ATVwire.com is significatly larger than utvwire...still the same answer though from you? Go ahead and install it on ATVwire?

Yes I have a webmaster acct at google...I have not sumitted the map from atvwire.com since I have not installed the modification there yet.

Thanks!!

 

[Keral_Patel]

Yes please do go ahead.

I don't think this is going to hurt it much. It will all be same in some days and then the rise will be seen. (The rise you know might depend on the site itself and the content or the type of content your site has)

Thanks.

 

[xtremeoff-road]

Sorry last one...lol

Would it be better to have the urls end with html or just a '/'

 

[Keral_Patel]

That doesn't matters much.

It can be anything from both.

Thanks.

 

[xtremeoff-road]

Ok thanks so much for taking the time...now I need to work some bugs out