Keywords in URL may help SEO according to Matt Cutts

According to a post by Barry Schwartz (of Rustybrick) on Search Engine Watch, Matt Cutts of Google has confirmed that the URL does play a role in SEO. The post quotes Cutts as follows:

“Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.”

Matt Cutts in this example is referring primarily to blogs, however the analogy could be applied to websites in general, as blogs are in essence websites.

However it may be worth noting that a typical blog post refers generally to a highly specific subject, and many do perform well in search engines. Again though it should be noted that many of these searches will tend either to be transient or only competitive over a minimal period of time.

Outside of blogging type subjects and keywords, does play a part in the “optimisation mix”, however it should be noted, that alone this will have little or no effect at all.

Add comment September 7th, 2006

Search Engines and the NoIndex issue

Matt Cutts has highlighted how various major search engines deal with the meta noindex tag in Handling noindex meta tags. In one of his recent blog he noticed the following issue when analysing a particular website and the effect of the Noindex attribute in the search engine resultsets

• Google doesn`t show the page at all
• Ask doesn`t show the page at all
• MSN shows a url reference and Cached link, but no snippet. Clicking the cached link doesn`t return anything.
• Yahoo! shows a url reference and Cached link, but no snippet. Clicking on the cached link returns the cached page.

However, ironically, if you use a robots.txt file Google does show the page in the some ways, which Matt Cutts acknowledges.

To read some other posts on the subject please visit:

• Danny Sullivans post on SEW
• Matt Cutts Original Post 

Add comment September 1st, 2006