Pretty URLs

I’d prefer not to get into a lengthy discussion about this because, quite honestly, I wouldn’t be doing it justice with the time that I’ve got available.

However, there appears to be some research indicating that Google likes URLs that are shorter - specifically 20 characters or less.

This also apparently factors into the ranking process in that pages with shorter URLs are statistically more likely to rank higher in the search engine.

Of course, having said that, there are some caveats to keep in mind…

1. Does this mean that you’ll instantly get a high ranking with a short URL? No. It just means that pages with a shorter URL tend to rank higher as a whole.
2. Is this the only ranking factor? Of course not. The URL seems to account for about 20-30% of the score.
3. I’d like to perform a test myself. How can I do this? Well, the fun part of this is that the data is already available. You just have to retrieve and process it. Basically, what you need to do is scrape the search engine for a large number of keywords. Look at the URL for position number 1. Is it a pretty URL according to the way you define “pretty”? If so, add 1 to your index for ranking position number 1. If not, subtract 1. Repeat this process for ranking positions 1-20 and do it for a large quantity of pages. It’ll tell you whether this factor has a statistical significance when ranking pages or not.

I’ve got some code that I’ve written (well, actually I farmed it out) to do this but I haven’t put it live yet. I hope to do that in the next month or so once some projects calm down.

In the meantime, if you would like to see some more statistical data with regards to Ranking Factors, take a look at this page.

G-Man

P.S. Yes, I know my URLs are not pretty but I happen to prefer a URL that is more descriptive. It hurts my rankings but I’m not terribly worried about it