Are Keyword Rich URL's useful?

[naturerugs]

Happy seasons greeetings to all.

Can someone suggest if using keywords in the url can attract penalty from search engines, especially google. Is it helpful? Is is considered ethical?

Examples:

http://www.naturerugs.com/round-area-rugs.asp
keyword "round area rugs"

http://www.naturerugs.com/Area-Rugs-...l-Rug-Pads.asp
keyword: "rugs pads"
{in this case second question, is Area-Rugs-Oriental-Rug-Pads.asp any way better than rug-pads.asp?}

Thanks a Ton

[awall19]

I would not use too many dashes as eventually (even if its not right now) it can be at least somewhat a sign of spam. The filname does not matter a ton, but helps a little bit. I usually use the keywords in the filename, but only a few.

The best way to seperate the words is to use the - as in your example. I would try to use all lower case letters to...to make linking easier :)

[ronniethedodger]

Are there any differences between an Oriental rug pad and any other rug pad?

Outside of what awall said about the possibility of stringing all of those words into the filename itself in regards to the spamming aspect of it...most importantly you are also diluting the term "rug pads" with non-essential words.

Filenaming does not play as much as an important role as does linking structure does. If you organize your site into major areas then sub-categories of those areas with matching keyword links, then you will do quite well.

I am sure you have heard the term "breadcrumbs" before. This is basicly what I am trying to say here.

You could have three areas for example...Oriental, Indian, Hand-woven...in their own directories such as www.naturerugs.com/oriental etc. and in each of those areas you would link to an Accessories area such as www.naturerugs.com/accessories where one of the pages in the accessories directory would be rug-pads.html.

The linking text on the Oriental page to the Rug Pad page would say "Oriental Rug Pads" for instance. On the Indian page....it would be "Indian Rug Pads". Both point to the same page which deals with nothing but rug pads.

The linking structure leads the spider into one area (Oriental) and it will see the link to Oriental Rug Pads. On the Rug Pad page itself, there should not be any cross-linking to the other areas (Indian & Hand-woven)....doing so puts more emphasis on the Oriental and not diluting it with the others.

Also, a site map would help in getting the rug pad page noticed.

[naturerugs]

awall & ronnie thanks for the suggestions. Offcourse more ideas are always welcome.

Answering your question, rug pads are the same for all (oriental or other). We already have a sitemap in most pages, is that not enough or should a link to that be copied to all pages?

ronnie, what I understand from you is that the rug-pads.asp page should not have links to other pages, linke the home page, the round-rugs.asp, silk-rugs.asp etc pages?

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by naturerugs

ronnie, what I understand from you is that the rug-pads.asp page should not have links to other pages, linke the home page, the round-rugs.asp, silk-rugs.asp etc pages?

There is an explanation of sorts of what I mean by this in the Dear Google thread. Scroll down to the part where my response refers to a Motel being the oddball of the bunch. This will somewhat explain my reasoning on that.

In a nutshell, if your Oriental rugs area has several pages with the text "Oriental Rug Pads" for the link pointing to rug-pads.html, then the actual rug-pad.html page does not have to contain the word oriental to show up in the results for "oriental rug pads". But this will only hold true if the rug-pad.html page does not dilute the importance of the word "oriental" by linking back to the other two areas "indian" and "hand-woven"....does that make sense?

The example of the motel in the thread I mentioned above...eludes to this type of reasoning.

You should always have a link to your Home Page on every page regardless of it's content. Well, you generally should do that. Plus your Home Page should link to your major areas.

The concept of cross-linking internally is not only a way of controlling PR disbursement, it is a way of controlling how the spider crawls. By controlling it to crawl to the Oriental, then to the rug-pads you are salting the rug pads (the meat of the query) with an Oriental flavoring.

[awall19]

But this will only hold true if the rug-pad.html page does not dilute the importance of the word "oriental" by linking back to the other two areas "indian" and "hand-woven"....does that make sense?

While strong anchor text can overpower a lack of copy, it is advisable to use exceptionally descriptive anchor text AND have the desired keywords on the page. In my estimation it would be hard to list well for oriental rugs without the word oriental on the page.

its not important to come up with technical theories which may or may not be true that may or may not change. typically if you want to be found for a phrase you need the keywords on that page unless you are just big or playing in a market which is not competitive...

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by awall19

While strong anchor text can overpower a lack of copy, it is advisable to use exceptionally descriptive anchor text AND have the desired keywords on the page. In my estimation it would be hard to list well for oriental rugs without the word oriental on the page.

My reasoning, and thus the structure, is that the page "rug-pads.html" stand on it's own merit. Not to be boxed into a corner and be associated with whether or not it is an oriental rug pad or an Indian rug pad.

I was making reference to the linking structure more that anything. The Motel case I cited in the Dear Google thread, although does not contain one of the words in the query...was an overstatement to prove this point.

I am not suggesting that the words oriental, indian, or hand-woven do not appear on the rug-pad.html page at all....just that the rug-pad.html page should NOT link back the other three areas -- especially with those three words in those links.

[naturerugs]

Thanks again both of you.

[awall19]

I am not suggesting that the words oriental, indian, or hand-woven do not appear on the rug-pad.html page at all....just that the rug-pad.html page should NOT link back the other three areas -- especially with those three words in those links.

Why not? I think I am confused by what you are saying.

[janeth]

I´m half a sleep so may be way off but I know on my site I´m very carefull which pages I link to with in the site because there are some pages I want to carry a higher pr for then other pages.

[excell]

It is my opinion that file naming should follow a pattern that is easiest for the folks that are working on the web site to follow... Logically named files are very helpful if you have more than one person working with the files.

As far as search engine optimisation goes, I see little benefit in the actual naming of files and agree with those that refer to navigation being more important to indexing and ranking.

I also do not think that search engines will penalise for the way files are named...it would cut across logic and convention. (Throw the baby out with the bathwater.)

[lmims]

Before, the filename could make a difference to your advantage.

The research I and my my mastermind group did showed that a dash produced better results, and underline worse results. The best results came specifically from the domain. We also found that a .org domain would list higher than .com or .net.

Your pages don't appear to be stuffed with keywords and you have not given your images keyword names.

Because your page has true content I don't think that this page would be penalized.

It looks like you are using portions of the same header on all of your pages. You might want to tailor your keywords to match the page content.


For example on http://www.naturerugs.com/area-rugs-...l-rug-pads.asp you have these
keywords, but nothing on the page to match.

Oriental rug, oval rugs, round rugs, square rugs, ORIENTAL RUG, Indian rugs
Persian rugs, Kashmir silk rugs, Oriental Rugs, persian carpets on line, &
persian rug dealers

On your main page naturerugs.com you have the same keywords but "persian carpets on line" & "persian rug dealers" never appear anywhere on the page.


Logan
http://www.print-money-at-home.org: work once get paid for lifetime.

[fathom]

Originally Posted by lmims

a dash produced better results, and underline worse results.

This really depends on what you are targeting e.g.

web-site or web_site...

Google reads:

web-site as web site (or separate words) and
web_site as website (or all one word)

...in this instance web_site would weight better than web-site for a typed in query containing "website" thus your permise is not quite correct.

We also found that a .org domain would list higher than .com or .net.

Pure Rubbish - there is catagorically no difference in weight from one extension to other - your research was flawed.

Google has repeatedly indicated this as well.

[janeth]

Hi lmims

After the change at Google do you think all of your findings are still the same?

That is all stuff I did not know.

[lmims]

Originally Posted by janeth

After the change at Google do you think all of your findings are still the same?

That is all stuff I did not know.

My two top sources for this were:
James Mackinlay, http://www.jrm-internet-marketing.com/ , who actually has link to Geeks-On-Steroids on his site

and
Markus Allen, my affiliate site of his http://www.print-money-at-home.org

Last spring a group of us would spend 2-3 hours once a week discussing Search Engine Strategies shortly after the Stephen Pierce Smart Pages had been released.

At one time Mark has thousands of pages indexed in google and other search engines. However, even before the florida update he changed direction in his marketing strategies, switching servers and directions.

Back in June/July we knew that the Florida Update was coping, we expecting it by August or September at the latest.

So he doesn't exactly have the same pages up now that he did then to be able to tell you.

I can tell you that he own several names in com, net, and org and he has alway made his preference the .org for at lest the last 2 years. Also he had a lot of listings in overture's core engine (not the the ppc) so his preference might have been based on other Search Engines Also.

The site for the company I work for keyword positions went up about 8 places to number 6 after the update.

[fathom]

Originally Posted by lmims

I can tell you that he own several names in com, net, and org and he has alway made his preference the .org for at lest the last 2 years.

A personal preference is not research nor does it make it correct.

The site for the company I work for keyword positions went up about 8 places to number 6 after the update.

Changing something does not necessarily make your ranking improve or decline... and changing nothing will often make your site increase or decrease in ranks.

Most often a change of sometime "today" and a increase or decrease "tomorrow" are incorrectly attributed to the most recent changes you have made.

If you are on a highway and attempt to pass a car -- you accelerate and if the car you are passing speeds up at the same time - it would appear as if you had slowed down but as you can physically see what is occurring you know the other car accelerated as well...

Now put a blind-fold on and try to make sense of this...

More often than not -- our assumptions we make are wrong -- simply because we do not see everything... and we don't like "not knowing" so we "make it up" and assume we are correct... until we are told otherwise.

[lmims]

Originally Posted by fathom

A personal preference is not research nor does it make it correct.

Perhaps, I should have worded that differently. According to my notes from April 2003 Mark specifically said that "his research showed that a .org domain would rank higher in the search engines than .com or .net"

The other thing I have sprawled next to that very folded up page is that robots.txt was very important as well as having your primary keyword as the first thing in your page title.

Now if the results are different today than they were in last Spring, or 2002, 2001, I don't know because Mark does not have anything on markusallen.com, or markusallen.net, and very little or markusallen.org. He is primarily using marketing-ideas.org now.

My most recent conversation and emails with Mark have not had anything to do with SE listings.

Originally Posted by fathom

Changing something does not necessarily make your ranking improve or decline... and changing nothing will often make your site increase or decrease in ranks.

Again, I should have thought about how I constructed my sentences. The same page I was referring to has not changed since July of 2003. It was ranked between 14 until 21 for our primary keyword until the Florida update where it went to 6.

So I made no changes, however other sites were ranked differently.

I never did buy an .org domain for this so I can't report any experiences about that. So much was going on on the call that it never occured to me to ask the details behind this.

I can say that after the on phone brainstorming sessions each one of the 6 people involved reported better results in their listings.

I hope I didn't say anything that offended you Fathom, you seem to be upset at me for some reason.

Logan

[inevitable1]

Fathom? What's up? I was following this thread and noticed you seem to be quite condescending toward Imins (twice). I like these forums because I learn a lot from the experts. It's very obvious that you're an expert in this field. With that in mind, and with all due respect to your area of expertise -- I find it disturbing that you would take such a position toward any forum member. We all know that we know what we know and we don't know what we don't know. That's why we're here. No need to take potshots. While I find your comments knowledgeable, I find that I'm more distracted by your delivery of them.

[fathom]

lmims - not getting on your case -- and no you have not offended me in anyway.

I spend alot of time reading what others write/do and weigh this against -- common beliefs (better known as "unproven" but probably correct).

When something interesting appears - I attempt to prove or disprove the premise - sometimes through reverse engineering, re-construction, or when not fesible through dialog with others.

I can at times be quite blunt in my dialogue - never meant to down or belittle anyone - just to ensure my words can not be mis-intrepreted or mis-guiding.

So it is I that -- if I have offended anyone - I sinerely apologize - it just my way.

Rod

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by lmims

Perhaps, I should have worded that differently. According to my notes from April 2003 Mark specifically said that "his research showed that a .org domain would rank higher in the search engines than .com or .net"

How did he make that determination?

The only way you could make an argument like that is that if you had three sites all being equal right down the line in terms of content, advertising, linkbacks, etc -- and the only difference being the domain extension .com, .net, .org.

What was his justification for this?

I have said this before in other topics, I believe that Google crawls by IP address and not by domain name. So Google is "somewhat blind" to domain names in general. It knows nothing about extensions or what a domain is named either.

[TrafficProducer]

http://his research showed that a .o... .com or .net"

ASP? may reduce search engine listings.

use .html which points to .asp to improve chances.

[naturerugs]

->ASP? may reduce search engine listings.

->use .html which points to .asp to improve chances.

TrafficProducer, can you refer to any research supporting this.

Rather from what I know if pages are in html & they redirect to asp etc its frowned by search engines.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by TrafficProducer

ASP? may reduce search engine listings.

use .html which points to .asp to improve chances.

I heard that rumor too. It is not true.

When I first heard that, it had to do with .shtml pages getting downranked because they could serve up different results for spiders. And that was pure poppycock too. I use a lot of .shtml pages, and enjoy very good rankings with them.

And it would not make any more sense to target a domain extension than it would a Html page extension. As you keenly pointed out, you can redirect from a .html enxtension page. You can also direct your Server to process .html extension pages to be processed as ASP....so to target an extension would be moot process.

The reason ASP pages probably are not or did not make top results could be due to a number of factors...one of which is bad coding and the spider gets led into an empty dataless page....something similar to badly coded framesets.

I have seen lots of ASP, PHP, CGI (even) pages enjoying top rankings in the results, so extensions have no bearing on placement. If you can crawl the page with a text browser like Lynx...then so can a spider. If a spider can crawl it successfully, you will get placed according to the content.

[cbp]

ASP? may reduce search engine listings.

One of my sites is >300 pages - has top five ranking for >200 keyword phrases (book titles) for each >200 of the pages - all are .asp

CBP

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by cbp

One of my sites is >300 pages - has top five ranking for >200 keyword phrases (book titles) for each >200 of the pages - all are .asp

CBP

I admire you for suppressing your urge to add on
that stock sentence of yours! ;0)

[fathom]

Originally Posted by ronniethedodger

I heard that rumor too. It is not true.

The reason ASP pages probably are not or did not make top results could be due to a number of factors...one of which is bad coding and the spider gets led into an empty dataless page....something similar to badly coded framesets.

Agree with RTD... Google also suggests many of the peoblems here... but not that they can't spider .ASP at all.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

[TrafficProducer]

ASP? may reduce search engine listings.

High rating, I assume you are talking about Google ranking(PR). What about other search engines?

Do Asp, cgi, Xml, or whatever get good ratings?

These tend to be dynamic pages which I believe some search engines may have trouble with.

[cbp]

My .asp pages are fine in all search engines. Not quite as good as google, but most still in top 10 for keywords (> top 5 in Google). It could be argued that .asp is the reason for this - but MOST sites (.asp or not) are either higher or lower ranked in other SE's relative to Google.

CBP

[cbp]

Should have also said that I only have 1 dynamic parameter in the URL's.

Yes search engines do have some problem with dyanmic URL's (.asp or not), especially if more than one or two parameters - they are getting better and Google does the best job to date at crawling them.

CBP

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by cbp

Yes search engines do have some problem with dyanmic URL's (.asp or not), especially if more than one or two parameters - they are getting better and Google does the best job to date at crawling them.

The best way that I know of to really see if your site is crawlable by a spider is to use the Lynx Browser. If you have a dynamic site of any kind you should use this browser to check it with. If it can crawl your site, then chances are very likely that a spider can to.

You can get the current version of Lynx at http://lynx.isc.org/current

Once you get this installed, go into setup and set it to deny all session cookies. The browser does not read javascript, so there is no settings for that. For all intents and purposes this browser acts just like a spider would act somewhat.

[Elite Skills]

Didn't yahoo ditch google a few weeks ago. Now it seems they use them again. Anyone know what's going on?

[cbp]

The have not ditched them yet, they will next year.

CBP