Five mistakes teams make with URL structure

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit URL structure.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Short, readable URLs get shared and clicked more
• Changing them later costs you rankings unless you redirect
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Turning this into a decision

How to tell if yours is fine

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about URL structure before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.