A day or two ago I was pinged by a co-worker from my previous job. He wanted to know why, during its recent redesign, I didn’t include keywords in the URLs of the pages on a site I originally built a long, long time ago. I told him that there was no concrete evidence anywhere to support the theory that search engines give any weight to keywords in URLs. He then pointed me to an article at Search Engine Land that begins by stating that, “Keywords in the URL can help rankings,” and, “Hyphens are better than underscores when separating multiple words.”
First I noted that I don’t include keywords on this site, either, and it’s been doing just fine. Then I argued that I find it very, very hard to believe that Google (or any other search engine) has some sort of negative bias against the underscore character but that hyphens are just fine. So basically I completely disagree with the single piece of actual “advice” in the article.
Am I saying that it is wrong to include keywords in your URLs? No. I don’t think that at all. I just don’t think you should be stuffing keywords into your URLs in an effort to boost your pages’ rankings in search engine result pages. It makes great sense to use words in your URLs if you’re doing it to improve the usability of your site or to make it easier for people to link to your site. Unfortunately most site designers and blog engines — WordPress included — fail to effectively do this.
