Does Google really care about URL structure?

[John Doe]

I've often used different URL structures - such as example.com/descriptive-folder-name/related-keyword.html ... but I've noticed that it doesn't have any effect on traffic if I just used ?s=related-keyword.

Do you notice this? Is URL structure worthless - is it the page structure/link structure which matters?

 

[kuskka]

It's way more valuable to use http://your-site.com/friendly-url rather than http://your-site.com/?codArea=1&codId=2, for example.

 

[Smith]

You're missing the point here a bit.

From my point of view, structure is super important.

eg: http://mywebsite.com/directory/sub-directory/page.html

Let's say that's your page. Now, if going backwards:

http://mywebsite.com/directory/sub-directory/ or even
http://mywebsite.com/directory/

Gives an error (404 - not found, for example), Google will definitely penalize you in the long run.

Because then, you would be better of with just:

http://mywebsite.com/page.html rather than
http://mywebsite.com/directory/sub-directory/page.html

Long story short, in the long run, it's a lot better to have organized structure. Now what you're talking about is the URL rewriting. On that topic, Google does prefer readable URLs instead obviously.

It will help you rank your pages higher.

http://mywebsite.com/23-my-page-here.html is a lot better than
http://mywebsite.com/page.php?id=23

Hope that helps.

 

[jackckingjill]

Also.. google will love your URL if it carries the keyword. So most of the websites will have their keyword as URL. If you explore a lot..you wll know more about it.

 

[neroux]

The so called SEO friendly URLs are actually rather human friendly as they are better readable and understandable than a URL with 15 values in its query string. For Google's robot it doesnt really matter as both are just strings. SEO URLs often include some sort of title in the URL and that might make a difference as the indexer actually gets something to parse but this is not directly related to query string or not query string.

 

[HostMafia]

i have done some research, and tested two different pages of my site with same content.
one page was with url structure like - "domain.tld/keyword-21" , and other page was a simple "domain.tld/p=16" .

And to my surprice, the second page, without url structure actually ranked higher for that keyword.