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Topics: Words in URL - technique also known
as "Keyword rich domain / path" (updated) - keyword rich
domain / path . How to use them, how to avoid mistakes. Hurricane and
downfalls after introduction of Stemming technology.
It is commonly assumed that one of the most effective
on-page variables (also known as: "things webmasters can control") is
the presence of some keywords in your domain or directory / page names.
i.e. a website that sells blue shoes can choose
www.blue-shoes.com as domain name, and a web page about blue shoes will
be named blue-shoes.html .
This is a very effective technique as long as there's
full coherence between your actual site contents and your domain, and
between your page contents and your page name. In other words,
keyword-rich name "blue-shoes.html" helps only if the words "blue" and
"shoes" can be found in your page texts.
Relevance to keywords
in Url is assigned following the words order: first keyword is more
important than the second, and so on.
Domain name (or class).
Always prefer INTERNATIONAL domain extensions. .COM, . NET, .ORG, .EDU
White Fly says...
Google assigns higher or lower status depending on domain extensions. EDU
and ORG extensions receive more credit. .COM extension websites include
both serious and (the most) spamming websites, therefore no lower
status is automatically assigned but they are checked more
meticulously.
Word Variations (Google Stemming
)
<<Google now uses stemming technology. Thus,
when appropriate, it will search not only for your search terms, but
also for words that are similar to some or all of those terms. If you
search for "pet lemur dietary needs", Google will also search for "pet
lemur diet needs", and other related variations of your terms. Any
variants of your terms that were searched for will be highlighted in
the snippet of text accompanying each result.>>
www.google.com/help/basics.html
This appear to be the most significant change in the
algorithm since the beginning of 2004. Now web page contents are fully
parsed by Googlebot: a keyword query is not intended as a WORD
but similarly to a plain sequence of chars. In other words,
searching for "ash"
may give also results for "crash"
"ashes" "splash" etc etc...It's not a joke.
Consequences, for developers and seo's, are dramatic:
1. Now "house" and
"houses" queries could give the same results' pages
2. Search results are multiplied
for most keywords. To maintain relevant serp's, many many websites have
been dramaticaly downranked from top positions to +1000
3. Old word separator [-] have
the same effectiveness than [_] . Then, with stemming technology,
multiple words don't need to be divided at all: pages like
"cold-mountain.html" , "cold_mountain.html" and "coldmountain.html"
share the same chances to be high ranked or not be ranked at all.
4. Same for web domains:
"www.raise-when-sun-shines.com" and "www.raisewhensunshines.com" have
same chances to be high ranked or not be ranked at all
How can developers deal with Google Stemming?
Simply, don't be afraid.
Whether you're new to Google optimization or you're
optimizing / building your site from zero, you have nothing to fear.
Having a keyword rich Url/path/filename is a good way to give your
contents one chance more to be high ranked by Google, but it's not the
only way.
Google stemming allows webmaster to name pages the way they want, BUT
page names must be coherent to pages' contents: i.e.
www.raise-when-sun-shines.com/sunshine.html doesnt help if you don't
have optimized the entire page for such keywords. Get it?
If you had a high ranked website and you have seen it
violently and suddenly downrated from #1 to #12932, we know that it can
be very frustrating. But you can consider this as an opportunity to
make a new design, structure for your site.
Whaat?? We observed that the great hurricane involved only websites
that was "too optimized". Duplicated contents, keyword repetitions,
long keyword-rich-Urls have been widely penalized and downrated. Even
if they was found on honest websites that were really relevant.
Webmasters who kept obsolete pages, thousands of doorway pages, for the
only reason that these pages were high ranked, have the chances to
clean them all, and starting from zero. Google downfall is not a death
penalty.
A common mistake that many webmasters make when trying
to optimize their site is to make theirselves life too easy: after
building a good html page, with proper use of headings, title tag,
images with "alt" attribute etc, they rename it hundreds of times, so
they publish the same page with different urls/names: this is SPAM,
this means duplicating contents the worst way. Even if that page is
really about your site contents, even if it has got the right keyword
density, you will be penalized for the only fact you have duplicated
it.
Once again: a keyword rich Url supports your Google
ranking as long as your page is: 1. content relevant 2. unique
and includes the keywords your Url /path contains.
In 2004 Google stemming was not a consolidated
technology, yet. Webmasters and experts feared Google could erase it
from algorithm any time.
Since we couldn't demonstrate that, in example, cold-mountain.html was
less effective than coldmountain.html, we suggested keeping on putting
an hyphen [-] as a word separator.
In 2005, webmasters and seo's peacefully cohabit
with stemming, which has been definitely estabilished into the algorithm:
a. you still must work for an "exact" keyword
relevancy (by putting an hyphen [-] between the keywords).
Since stemming allow search engines to show 'similar' results after
users' queries, you can get advantage of it by
b. creating some pages whose name is compatible
with it: in example, you can name a page
pallmallcigarettes.html and optimize it for the keyword "pall" "mall"
"cigarette" "cigarettes": for each page your chances in getting
high-ranked are multiplied.
Php/Jsp/Asp/Cfm etc... dynamic
pages / database driven contents.
Differently from static html pages, these kind of
pages are created on the fly on users' input. Anyway, fortunately
Google does spider and put in its index dynamic pages too, as long as
(1) your dynamic pages don't show more than 2 (two) variables after the
"?" and (2) doesn't ID=***** as Google intend the word "ID" as a
session identity.
Resume.
Honestly, we hate this practice. We cry when we see websites, whose
name is, in example,
www.cheap-sport-men-women-children-shop-ecommerce.com getting
high ranked for one or more of those keywords. But that's how Google
actually works. Keywords in URL seem to be the first on-page variable
Googlebot starts to index when spidering a website and assigning a
relevance.
Since this is a Google Ranking
tutorial, we are (regretfully) forced to SUGGEST this technique:
just remember that a keyword rich Url supports your Google ranking as
long as your page is:
1. content relevant
2. unique and
3. includes the keywords your Url / path contains
4. minus sign [-] (or hyphen) is still considered the best way to
divide phrases (you cannot use spaces)
White
Fly says...
Use a SINGLE hyphen to indicating spaces between words in Url or path. More
than two hyphens (i.e. google----ranking.html) is considered POTENTIAL
SPAMMING ACTIVITY.
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