For a while now, there’s been an ongoing debate about whether or not keywords in URLs and file names can help with search engine rankings. I’ve been of the opinion that although they might add some benefit in certain cases, they can also look incredibly spammy, and it’s hardly ever worth changing the name of an existing, indexed page in the hopes that it will boost your rankings.
Well, Matt Cutts has now joined in this debate, and this is what he had to say:
“Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.”
Interesting. I would have to agree that keyword URLs do seem to help the search engine traffic to our blog, which is already quite high. On new pages that target specific areas (e.g. certain features of your software), it can also be worth using keywords in the file name.
Nevertheless, I still think that the more important pages of your site should be given “normal”, non-spammy names. Pages like keyword-index, keyword-features, keyword-download and keyword-purchase won’t make anybody happy.
Keywords in File Names & URLs Do Help
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