Hello guys!
My name is Serge Bond and I am a search engine analyst working for
Web CEO. I decided to find out the real importance of keyword presence in URL. There are so many empty-minded topics with lots of opinions and no research preceding them. That's why I performed the following research:
I made a list consisting of both very competitive and uncompetitive keyphrases. The level of competition was estimated by number of results (in Google and Yahoo) and by the number of daily searches (taken from WebCEO). Overall, I have taken 24 keyphrases. Here’s the list:
By each keyword I have extracted the URLs of top-700 pages. This was done, again, with the help of Web CEO. Even though our tool lets you extract up to 1000 URLs, Google rarely gives
really more than 700 (even less, as a rule). You can see the number of URLs for each kwd in the table above.
After this, I have created a spreadsheet summarizing the number of keywords from the keyphrase in these URLs. For example, let’s consider the keyphrase “search engine optimization”. In my spreadsheet, next to the URL
search-engine-bla.com would stand “2” (because in the URL are present “search” (1) and “engine” (2)). Accordingly, in front of
search-engine-optimization.com would stand “3”. For example:
You can see all other tables at my blog
seometry.blogspot.com
Then, I have made charts for each keyword. At the horizontal axis we have
site rank. At the vertical axis we have the
number of kwds from keyphrase in the URL corresponding to each rank. Here you can see the most typical patterns:
Competitive keyphrases:
Uncompetitive keyphrases:
For competitive keywords we can see the following picture:
- In Yahoo pages with many keywords in URL are saturated at the top of the list.
In Google the picture is almost the opposite. We can see more pages with keywords in URL at the bottom of the list.
For uncompetitive keywords the situation is different
- In Yahoo the general picture remains the same.
In Google the distribution becomes similar to Yahoo: pages with many keywords in URL are situated at the top of the list.
My conclusions:
- For Yahoo presence of keywords in URL is a considerable ranking factor.
In case of competitive keywords, Google takes presence of keywords in URL as overoptimization and penalizes a page.
In case of uncompetitive keywords, Google uses this factor in its ranking process.
Importance of kwrd in URL–30000 URLs analyzed by WebCEO team
Linear Mode
