Three myths about URL structure

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few things about URL structure that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

“It only matters for big sites”

Short, readable URLs get shared and clicked more. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

“Our platform handles it”

Words beat numeric IDs for both people and crawlers. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

How to tell if yours is fine

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about URL structure before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Changing them later costs you rankings unless you redirect — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.