In 2014 has any SEO value rewriting urls?  If my site consistently links product page, and that product page shows a consistent canonical url, is there a real SEO doing this  http://example.com/products/woman-tracksuit-in-hemp   instead of this  http://example.com/product.php?id=6588   I know that a human being would be more comfortable with a rewrited url, but I would like to focus on SEO and bots, especially Google
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A coworker and I are locked in a debate over the value of SEO keywords in the URL of a page. She wants to change all the filenames of the HTML pages of a fencing company so they look like residential-home-chicago.html, contact-chicago-contractor.html, and so on. She is convinced that because Google highlights keywords in URLs in search results, that means that putting keywords here is more valuable.  My position is that these do not improve SEO, since Google doesn't seem to give keywords in the URL any more weight than keywords in the body of the page, and . In the meantime, they make it harder for me to find the pages I want when its time to edit them, and the site as a whole looks cheap and spammy.   suggests to me that yes, keywords in URLs are useful, but not superior, and that they are more useful for human readability than search engine rankings.  I'm looking for authoritative sources that support either position, not blog articles from SEO optimization companies trying to promote themselves.
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Can I use:  &lt;link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="?l=en" /&gt;   to link pages with different languages for SEO (recommended for )? Can that URL be relative as in the example above, or does it have to be full (start with http://example.com)?
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I want to remove multiple URL in my website (developed in ASP MVC).  All these URL have the format www.example.com/planning/xxx  I have already changed the code to make these URLs 301 redirect.  I expact that would indicate to robots to remove the page of their index.  Now, when I check the Google Search Console, I see many soft 404s which corresponds to these URLs.  Why did Google consider them as soft 404 whereas I do a permanent redirection so with the 301 status? Are these URL really removed from the Google index? (I don't think because many of them are still found in the Google results.) Did a better way exist to remove multiple URLs? Will modifying robots.txt with to add Disallow: /planning be useful or will it only prevent Google from indexing new URLs without removing the existing?  Thanks
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I'm refactoring my ASP.net application from ASP.net 3.5 to 4.0. Also I'm changing the URLs to user friendly URLs /product.aspx?id=100 to /product-name/100.  All my pages are indexed by search engines and the site has already been online for 6 years. I'm planning to do 301 redirect from the old pages to the new one.  I want to make sure I won't lose the rankings and traffic.  Any suggestion how to do it properly?
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I have a website with url like that :  www.xxxxxx.com/card/wow/20-euros   In term of SEO is it better to use slash or hyphen?  www.xxxxxx.com/card-wow-20-euros   Even though it will be trickier with hyphen to route correctly with only hyphen ...  Or it doesn't matter?
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I'm coding a small CMS to get a better understanding of how they work and to learn some new things about PHP. I have however come across a problem.  I want to use mod_rewrite (though if someone has a better solution I'm up for trying it) to produce nice clean URLs, so site.com/index.php?page=2 can instead be site.com/tools  By my understanding I need to alter my .htaccess file each time I add a new page and this is where I strike a problem, my PHP keeps telling me that I can't update it because it hasn't the permissions. A quick bit of chmod reveals that even with 777 permissions it can't do it, am I missing something?  My source for mod_rewrite instructions is currently  incase it is important/useful.
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We have recently discovered a host of spammy links pointing to our website been put up in last 1 month through webmaster tool We have not engaged any seo agency/link building and have never created these links  Worst, these are spammy forum sites and almost some-one seems making an attack to our site as the link and keyword is same in all these sites Till not Have not received any warning, however as it has come to our notice - before any SERP getting down - we want to action this out  One thing we have observed is that - All these spammy links points to a single inner page of website  Pl suggest as have   a) Will Google disvow tool will work by stating to disvow these links  or  b) Is it a good way if we make this specific page 'nofollow' and even 'noindex' The reasoning behind this is like if the page is not followed and not indexed - the negative links pointing to the page of the site is already no follow and may be out from google serp  or what's the best alternate way to tackle this. Pl suggest in urgent help and advise required
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This is a  about Apache's mod_rewrite.   Changing a request URL or redirecting users to a different URL than the one they originally requested is done using mod_rewrite. This includes such things as:   Changing HTTP to HTTPS (or the other way around) Changing a request to a page which no longer exist to a new replacement. Modifying a URL format (such as ?id=3433 to /id/3433 ) Presenting a different page based on the browser, based on the referrer, based on anything possible under the moon and sun. Anything you want to mess around with URL   Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Mod_Rewrite Rules but Were Afraid to Ask!  How can I become an expert at writing mod_rewrite rules?   What is the fundamental format and structure of mod_rewrite rules? What form/flavor of regular expressions do I need to have a solid grasp of? What are the most common mistakes/pitfalls when writing rewrite rules? What is a good method for testing and verifying mod_rewrite rules? Are there SEO or performance implications of mod_rewrite rules I should be aware of? Are there common situations where mod_rewrite might seem like the right tool for the job but isn't? What are some common examples?   A place to test your rules  The  web site is a great place to play around with your rules and test them. It even shows the debug output so you can see what matched and what did not.
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Currently look after 3 websites. I changed one of them to be HTTPS as it's ecommerce, however have seen a huge drop in organic traffic since this was implemented. Went from around 800 impressions to 400.   Any ideas as to why?   Very concerning as I expected it to improve if anything!  I set up 301 redirects to carry through to old pages to http://www.example.com/product1 would go to https://www.example.com/product1  I also set up a separate webmaster account for the HTTPs version as our integration wasn't working well with Google Merchant Centre, and data is flowing correctly but unsure why/if this would cause conflict.  Very confused!
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Hi i have recently moved my forum from Mybb to Vanilla, so the index pages such as showthread.php now do not exist. This is a big problem for SEO, what do I do to redirect this to the home page?
90250
I have a website that shows data that only valid for one year, but like to keep the date for archive and compare purposes.  For now I have a 301 redirect (so the other redirecting domains will always have the "newest" content) for domain.com/content/ --> domain.com/content/content-2014.  However some users use domain.com/content/content-2014 or older years for links on their websites, so content on year 2013 has a high pagerank. How can I manage this content for SEO?  domain.com/content/ --> domain.com/content/content-2014 (current year)  domain.com/content/content-2013  domain.com/content/content-2014  domain.com/content/content-2015  Is it smart to redirect 301 old content 2013 --> 2014 and make a new archive page? Or keep it like this?
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We recently took on a new client whose previous SEO company had partaken in some dodgy link building tactics.  They appear to have done some blog comment spam, very poorly.  The situation we are now in is this:  We have a site with an internal page deemed more important than the homepage (the homepage has 60 linking root domains and the internal page 879). It looks as though the previous SEO company submitted a disavow request, there's a message in Webmaster Tools from a few weeks back saying it had been received, but no further correspondence.  I have doubts as to whether this disavow request was done correctly... Plus I'm not sure that Google has issued the site a warning yet as they are ranking position one for the keywords on the internal page.  Our clients want us to handle this in the correct manner, whether it be to simply ignore it and wait for Google to send a warning about the links, remove the offending internal page and leave a 404, or try to disavow the links that Google doesn't know about yet from 800+ websites.  Suggestions for the best practice for dealing with this situation?
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Given that I'm using  &lt;link rel="alternate" href="http://m.example.com"&gt; on my desktop site and &lt;link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com"&gt; on mobile, is there any SEO reason for me to replace the mobile site and desktop site with a single responsive site?  If I keep my separate mobile site, is there anything else I should be doing to ensure optimal SEO?  Secondly, what is the most SEO-friendly way of redirecting example.com to m.example.com when a mobile user requests it? Javascript? Apache? Something else? Or are all these redirection approaches the same for SEO?
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In Google Search Console/Webmaster Tools, I found 404 error URLs with this pattern: http://example.com/page-name/example.com  This is happening to all pages, posts, and even category type.  For example:   Here is the .htaccess file:    Does anyone know what might be causing this?
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I am working on an ecommerce site, I told our SEO consultant that I plan to make the URL scheme: /products/&lt;id&gt;/&lt;name&gt;. This is similar to Stackoverflow's URLs which are /questions/&lt;id&gt;/&lt;title&gt;.  He asked me if I could change the URL scheme to /p/&lt;id&gt;/&lt;name&gt; instead. I know why he wants this change, the word "products" isn't needed to find the correct product, and it doesn't offer any SEO, so shortening it to just p would make the relevant keywords in the &lt;name&gt; weigh more.  His main priority is maximizing SEO, but the part that I don't think he is considering is how this effects the semantics of the site. Also having the word "products" looks like it has meaning and a reason for being there, just having a p looks chaotic and ugly to me. I also don't think it makes that much of a difference does it? Stackoverflow doesn't use /q/&lt;id&gt;/&lt;title&gt; and they do just fine, I do realize that theres many factors at play here though, not just the URL.  So I want some outside opinions on which is the better way and why?
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So, on all of our sites that are not search facing we've applied a robots.txt file (per , or any other similar question).  However, if search terms are specific enough, the domain itself can be found via results. An example of this can be found . As you can see from the link, the domain itself can be found (content is not cached, but domain is listed). Additionally, performing a search with site:hyundaidigitalmarketing.com should 3 results. Checking backlinks provides a few as well, but I obviously cannot prevent them (linking is allowed in context) or control how these are handled (can't tell the host to add nofollow, noindex).  Now, I know this is a severe edge case, however my companies clients are doing just this. In fact, our domains are pretty good, so even seemingly arbitrary searches are turning up relevant results. Now, I have to write up a report on how/why this is happening.  So, I turn to the wonderful Stack Exchange network to help me either understand what I am missing or understand what is happening. Links to industry articles are extremely helpful but, anything you can give is obviously greatful. I do intend to offer bounties the best I can to make this an answer to turn to in the future.  Edit: I've opened a bounty on this question in hopes of getting some more responses on it. I've also provided the results of my own research below.
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I have a site where Google has already indexed about 1 million pages, and I want to change all the URL paths for SEO purposes, ensuring that we always have our keywords in the path.  Technically I know how to complete it (301 redirects, new canonical URL, update sitemap, etc.) but I'm wondering if Google will penalize the site because of it, or if links will disappear from search results until they are re-crawled?