Do you 'optimise' your website structure?

[Andyhenry]

Hi Warriors,

As an SEM consultant I get asked a lot of questions about seo and website structure, specifically relating to Wordpress and I'm always testing what works.

Things don't often change to any significant degree but one thing I have noticed recently is that my sites get better traction in Google if I do NOT make the page links 'friendly'. You know using the /%postname%/ for permalink settings.

I used to do this by default. At first because it helped, then after a while just because it's what I used to do, but I've been seeing that Google seems to prefer it when I don't do that now. It seems that the pages load slightly quicker and the search engines prefer the structure that WP uses by default for the links.

So I've now stopped changing the permalinks and am seeing even better results.

Has anyone else noticed this? or tested it?

I know it goes against most seo guru advice, but then again I've always tested this stuff for myself as my own business relies on understanding what works.

Andy

[Kurt]

Hey Andy,

I'm not a WP user so I can't respond directly. But I'm trying to take advantage of Google's "snippets" by using anchors in pages/links that take people to different parts of the pages.

The problem is, I had nofollow/noindex tags on my test pages so they didn't get indexed for 6 months, until I finally figured it out. It's a long story, but I originally designed the site to be a private membership site, which is why I added the noindex tags, and forget to take them out later when I made the content public.


Here's an example link:
http://domain.com/page.html#anchor

The anchor will link to a specific part of the page, and this part of the page should be optimized to match the anchor.

Instead of having a single link to a page, you have multiple links to different parts of the page, each optimized for different, but related topics.

I don't mean to hijack your thread, but it's a different way of optimizing a website structure that's new. I just failed at testing it for the last 6 months.

[Andyhenry]

Hey Kurt,

Yes I noticed you've been doing that for a while. I think it's something most people don't even consider, but in the same way as Google cares about pages rather than sites, it does make sense that they care about content more than pages. I've found some really nice search results where I'm now able to control which content they pick up for the search result descriptions rather than feeding them description meta tags.

Andy

[bhuthecoder]

quote from wordpress regarding %postname%

Starting Permalinks with %postname% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons..

you need good hosting, if you want to use %postname%

i use sitename/%postname% for my small websites and they indexed very well.

[matt5409]

Originally Posted by Andyhenry

Hi Warriors,

As an SEM consultant I get asked a lot of questions about seo and website structure, specifically relating to Wordpress and I'm always testing what works.

Things don't often change to any significant degree but one thing I have noticed recently is that my sites get better traction in Google if I do NOT make the page links 'friendly'. You know using the /%postname%/ for permalink settings.

I used to do this by default. At first because it helped, then after a while just because it's what I used to do, but I've been seeing that Google seems to prefer it when I don't do that now. It seems that the pages load slightly quicker and the search engines prefer the structure that WP uses by default for the links.

So I've now stopped changing the permalinks and am seeing even better results.

Has anyone else noticed this? or tested it?

I know it goes against most seo guru advice, but then again I've always tested this stuff for myself as my own business relies on understanding what works.

Andy

Hmm, I think you'd need to do some VERY extensive, and conclusive testing before claiming this and abiding by it for all future projects - that seems like a huge step backwards.

Also I've literally just got to grips with mod_rewrite so I hope you're not right! :P

[Andyhenry]

Originally Posted by matt5409

Hmm, I think you'd need to do some VERY extensive, and conclusive testing before claiming this and abiding by it for all future projects - that seems like a huge step backwards.

Also I've literally just got to grips with mod_rewrite so I hope you're not right! :P

I'm not trying to convince you to change - I've been doing SEM for 15 years and I've just been seeing this for several months and testing it myself and because I know that most people do NOT test this and they just copy whatever everyone else is saying (and that doesn't change often - because even the people telling others what to do often don't test either) I thought I'd throw it out there to see if other SEMers have tested this for themselves.

There's a huge IM culture of repeating very old seo advice and I've read several people's products about WP in particular where they've given bad advice and anyone who actually tested would know it, but because most people do not test and most people who post about seo are just repeating what others say - I doubt many people have actually looked at this and are blindly following poor advice.

It only helps me if no-one else tests but I'm not so selfish as to not share my findings.

Andy

[MikeFriedman]

Hey Andy. I'm not sure this phenomena is just limited to Wordpress. I think Google is shifting slightly away from using keywords in the URL as a ranking factor, which is one of the biggest reasons people have been using the /%postname%/. But the keyword rich URL structures have been abused by so many IM'ers that it was only a matter of time until Google made adjustments.

I haven't done testing on this on my own sites yet, but I am studying it in a couple of SERPs. If I'm right, it would go along with what you are saying about the /%postname%/ structure.

That along with bhuthecoder's post about it affecting performance in Wordpress, i.e. load time, what you are seeing would make a lot of sense.

[Kurt]

Originally Posted by Andyhenry

I'm not trying to convince you to change - I've been doing SEM for 15 years and I've just been seeing this for several months and testing it myself and because I know that most people do NOT test this and they just copy whatever everyone else is saying (and that doesn't change often - because even the people telling others what to do often don't test either) I thought I'd throw it out there to see if other SEMers have tested this for themselves.

There's a huge IM culture of repeating very old seo advice and I've read several people's products about WP in particular where they've given bad advice and anyone who actually tested would know it, but because most people do not test and most people who post about seo are just repeating what others say - I doubt many people have actually looked at this and are blindly following poor advice.

It only helps me if no-one else tests but I'm not so selfish as to not share my findings.

Andy

Hey Andy,

The one piece of "advice" that really gets me is about using the meta keyword tag. What's it been, a decade or so since Google factored in the keyword tag for ranking?

Back to your original question...Not being a WP guy, I didn't quite understand what you were saying. Now I think I do. Awhile ago, a person I highly respect in SEO said "numbers" as URLs were doing very well. For example:

domain.com/11322223.php

In some of my software I use a similar naming structure, using a time/date stamp. Some customers have wanted more ability to use precise keywords, but I've never seen the need.

So my own personal experience is that it probably isn't a big deal either way.

And my advice, as always, is to mix it up. What may work today may not work tomorrow, and vice versa. I'd say on some sites use /%postname%/ and on others don't worry about it.

[Kurt]

Originally Posted by matt5409

Also I've literally just got to grips with mod_rewrite so I hope you're not right! :P

Let me hijack Andy's thread once again.

Want to see a cool use for mod rewrite?

Check this out...I have a very old mirror of Wikipedia on this site, with a custom search engine that uses mod rewrite to create html pages "on the fly".

Create any URL you want, using legit keywords you would find in Wikipedia and watch this technique build pages. Just follow this format:

www.pheeds.com/elvis-presley.html

www.pheeds.com/las-vegas-nevada.html

Substitute "elvis-presley" or "las-vegas-nevada" with any reasonable keywords you want, replace hypens with spaces, and watch mod rewrite create "html" pages from a search engine using a wikipedia mirror.