Google’s Matt Cutts On Keywords In The URL

Mar 18, 2009 at 9:34am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google’s Matt Cutts posted a recent video answering a question about the position of the keywords in the URL. The question asked, does the order of the words in the URL make an impact on one’s ranking at Google? Matt Cutts said one should not obsess about the order of the words but he said keywords in the URL “does help a little bit.”

I asked Matt if this means we should go back to our existing sites and change URLs without keywords to have keywords in them. Matt told me, “If you’ve got an existing solution that works for you, it’s not really worth going back to change your urls. It may worth considering when you’re doing a new site.”

I then asked Matt if all new sites should make sure to have keywords in the URL. Matt answered, “It makes sense if a) it’s easy for you to do in your content management system, and b) the keywords are useful and descriptive–definitely don’t overdo it.”

Here is the video, it is worth watching:

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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5 COMMENTS ON Google’s Matt Cutts On Keywords In The URL

chiropractic, March 18th, 2009 at 3:47 pm ET:
Premium member since 01/2009

“I really wouldn’t obsess about it in that level of detail.” is a common Matt Cutts answer. I think my next question for him will be… What one thing should webmasters be obsessive about? :)

leoludwig, March 19th, 2009 at 3:49 am ET:

@chiropractic: and his answer would be “Creating compelling, interesting, unique, link-worthy content for their website on a regular basis”.

leoludwig, March 19th, 2009 at 4:12 am ET:

On second thought, he probably wouldn’t mention “link-worthy”.
Every webmaster knows – or should know – that “compelling, interesting, unique content” automatically get links.

shashikant, March 20th, 2009 at 1:50 am ET:

I completely agree with leoludwig, If you have unique content and static links on page that will help lot :)

SteveJohnston, March 23rd, 2009 at 9:03 am ET:

Why is it he ignores the role of these keywords in the anchor text of the links that these URLs may enjoy?! When the URL is used on its own as the anchor in an external link, these keywords, along with the phrases they do, or don’t make, depending on the word order, really come into play.

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