In one of the SMX videos available in the member’s area of Search Engine Land, several panelists noted that a shorter URL is more likely to be clicked in the SERPs than a longer one. That is, if you have a URL like
http://www.yourdomain.com/2009/03/19/article-title/
it is less likely to get clicked than the following one, which is the same but without the dates:
http://www.yourdomain.com/article-title/
As I researched this, I noticed that Search Engine Land does not use dates in its URLs, nor does Google spam expert Matt Cutts, nor does Aaron Wall.
2 Comments
http://www.yourdomain.com/2009/03/19/article-title/
it is less likely to get clicked than the following one, which is the same but without the dates:
http://www.yourdomain.com/article-title/
As I researched this, I noticed that Search Engine Land does not use dates in its URLs, nor does Google spam expert Matt Cutts, nor does Aaron Wall.
2 Comments
Comments
I have one comment about this article, which refers to the paragraph "I am told that a 301 redirect should not drop page rank (PR), but somehow it has happened with me. In my case, these changes were made almost 4 weeks ago, and individual page ranks have still not gotten caught back up. A few of my most popular pages that had a Google Toolbar PR of 4 or 5, are currently showing a PR of 0. This may be normal, or it may be that I have done other things that are making it take longer for the PR to catch up"As Bruce mentions the PR has now updated, which is what I would expect, as there has been a change in visible Toolbar Page Rank. Although the underlying page rank will update with a 301, the Toolbar Page Rank WILL NOT show up until the next Page Rank rollout. So if you change your URLs just after a PR update, you won’t see the change for up to three months. The same applies to a 301 redirect for a domain.
Great observation KDye. My "real PR" apparently did not drop, and "followed" the 301’s, because search traffic and SERP positioning for my popular posts remained pretty much unchanged. I did not really think of this at the time, though, and had forgotten that the Toolbar PR is only updated every few months or so ... hence, it was seeing pages that weren’t stored in the database (only the ones with dates were stored in the database), and hence set them to 0, as appropriate for the model it uses (the "dated model", pun intended). So, for a while this had me thinking I had done something wrong along the way. (Other than wasting my time on changing the internal linking, I pretty much did everything else right, except that I should not have done all of it at once ... one should [almost] never make too many changes at once.)