Google posted its first video in a series of what they are calling The Non-Canonical Cabinet. In this video, Cherry Prommawin and Gary Illyes discussed how Google Search deals with URLs. They discuss URLs as a ranking signal, hyphens versus underscores, emojis and much more.
In short, Gary said that keywords in a URL or domain are an "incredibly small signal" for rankings and won't do much. Gary also said that you should use hyphens in your URL path to separate those keywords and not underscores. These are actually all topics we covered before, but the video goes into more technical aspects of how Google Search handles URLs. Gary made a point to also add that Google can detect spamming in URLs.
They cover:
- 🌐 What can go in a domain name
- 🈶 Internationalized domains, Punycode, and why "xn--" is not a typo
- Whether 🐔🔥.com can exist (it can't, please stop)
- 📈 Whether "best-grilled-chicken-cheap-delicious-amaze-amaze-amaze" URL make you # 1 forever
- 🔣 Emoji in URL paths, percent-encoding, and how it can ruin your second date
- ➖ Hyphens vs underscores, settled
Here is the video:
Here is our previous coverage of URLs as a ranking signal:
- Google: URLs Provide Minimal Additional Signals For Search Engines
- Keywords in File Names & URLs Do Help
- Google: Keywords In URLs A Very Small Ranking Factor
- Google: Keywords In URLs Have Minimal Impact Once Content Is Indexed
- Google: Words In A URL A Very Light Weight Factor But Less After Indexing
- Google Again: Do Not Worry About Words Or Keywords In URLs
- Google: Keywords In URLs Are An Overrated SEO Factor
- Google: Some SEOs Over Focus On URL Structure
- Google Really Wants You To Avoid Changing URLs Just For SEO Reasons
- Google: Avoid Change URLs Unless You Really Have To
- Google: Word Location In URLs Does Not Matter For SEO
- Google: Don't Change URLs When Replacing Old Content With New Content
- Google: Don't Change Your URLs For SEO Purposes
Here is our previous coverage of hyphens versus underscores:
- Google: Hyphens Still Recommended Over Underscores In URLs For SEO
- Why John Mueller Of Google Is Not A Fan Of Keyword Hyphenated Domains
- Google: Hyphens In Domain Names Not Considered Low Quality
- Google: We Don't Care About Underscores Vs. Dashes In URLs
- Matt Cutts Wanted Google To Treat URL Underscores As Separators
- Proof Google Treats Underscores & Hyphens Differently?
- Matt Cutts of Google Says Still Go With Dashes in URLs
- Hyphens & Underscores Are Now Treated Equally in Google.com
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
