[GUIDE] How to write URL slugs 101

Nice guide!
I will do following the guide and see what will happen .
Thank you .
 
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tattooedbuddha said:
If you really want a separate post for "8 Reasons why life in Sweden is amazing" I would either include it as a subheading in a larger article, like "/sweden/life/" OR if it has enough search volume on its own to warrant a separate article I would simply have it as close to the root url as possible, like "/why-life-in-sweden-is-amazing" or "/why-life-sweden-amazing"

It depends.

Why?

It ties into topical maps and topical authority, a topical map has 2 sections, an outer section and a core section. The outer section is there to build topical authority so that the core section (where your money pages will be) has a lot easier to rank.

It depends on the monetization method of your website, if you are a company selling tourist tours and trips in Sweden, then your outer section should be all about Sweden, the culture, what life is like, the music, the food, the weather, the history, etc. While your core section of your topical map ties it to your services more specifically, in this case tours and trips in Sweden.

For this reason the outer section will mainly be linking to the core section, its purpose is to get more and higher historical data (and more sessions and queries)-

If you are able to cover all attributes of the entities in the outer section, and if you are able to provide enough level of expertise, accuracy, unique information and continous quality increase, the search engine will be increasing your websites authority to its central entity. When this happens, ranking for the core section of your topical map becomes a cakewalk.

Here is a simple trick that works (without using a plugin)

Lets say you want to have 3 different posts, Sweden, Life and Culture.

Create categories for Sweden and life.

Then create posts for all three.

The Sweden post should not be in a category = website.com/sweden/

You then put your life post in the Sweden category that you created = website.com/sweden/life/

You then put your culture post in the life category you created = website.com/sweden/life/culture/

The only downside with this is that it creates website.com/category/life/ pages for your categories, I suppose you could noindex these, but I'm not sure how that would affect the posts themselves.
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Anecdotally I've found that it's best to not go further down than 3 levels when creating categories and subcategories. Any further and Googlebot tends to bounce, at least from my sites.
 
tattooedbuddha said:

How to write URL slugs 101​


URL slugs are all about relevance and cost of retrieval.

Let’s get into it.

What is cost of retrieval?

Cost of retrieval is all about making it as cheap as possible for Google to retrieve information from your page. I.e. decreasing average page sizes, giving direct factual answers to queries, using clear HTML structure.

It’s about lowering the barrier for Google to index and rank your content, a webpage can be of very high quality yet if it’s not worth the crawling cost, it will not rank.

This leads us to a seemingly small yet important part of lowering the cost of retrieval, the URL of a webpage.

Let’s pretend we have a website about traveling in Scandinavia, and we want a page about life in Sweden, now that's a fairly broad topic don't you think? It certainly warrants a whole cluster of pages beneath it for support.

So how should we write the URL for this page?

Which of the below examples do you think is the most relevant and cost efficient to the query of “life in sweden”?

Example 1
website.com/life-in-sweden/

OR

Example 2
website.com/sweden/life/

OR

Example 3
website.com/sweden/life-in-sweden/

OR

Example 4
website.com/life/sweden/

OR

Example 5
website.com/8-amazing-things-about-life-in-sweden/

Did you guess correctly?

That’s right! Example number 5!

No, not really. The correct answer is example number 2.

Why?

Because it has the smallest cost of retrieval (it’s as short as possible) while still having the highest possible relevancy for the query.


But Tattooedbuddha, would not example 4 perform just as well? It’s just as short and contains the same words even!


The difference here is about contextual relevancy, a page with the URL “website.com/sweden/” and a page with the URL “website.com/life/” is going to contain vastly different content and put the pages following it in a different context as well.

Let’s say we want supporting pages for our page about life in Sweden, using example number 2 as a starting point this becomes simple. All we need to do is find different attributes of life in Sweden, if we want a page about the culture, the url becomes “/sweden/life/culture/”, if we want to write about social life, it becomes “/sweden/life/social/” etc.

This creates a clear, cost-efficient, relevant, and user-friendly URL that is easy to understand for both users and crawlers.

It also allows for easy, natural internal linking between pages to distribute pagerank. This is because if your internal links do not have any kind of relevance, logic or clickability, they will not pass pagerank or relevance.

For a URL like “/sweden/life/social”
  • If sweden and life are both high quality pages, the search engine will assume that the page for culture is of high quality as well, and it will get crawled.
  • The search engine will also understand that the main topic of the page “social” is about “social life in Sweden”
  • This also allows for natural internal linking between other contextually relevant pages, like “norway/life/social”
TL;DR
  • Do not repeat words in URL slugs.
  • Try to use single words or two words at most.
  • Keep the most important attributes closest to the root of the URL.
  • Smaller URLs generally give better rankings (less cost of retrieval).
  • Use the URL to set the macro context of the page, while the page title sets the micro context.
That’s all for today, cheers!
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Thx for your guild
What about if keyword and articles we write it in other languages,
we should translate in to eng or we should use that language

Becuz when we use other languages ex. Thai it turn to other and it will be very long URL
 
kidfang1995 said:
Thx for your guild
What about if keyword and articles we write it in other languages,
we should translate in to eng or we should use that language

Becuz when we use other languages ex. Thai it turn to other and it will be very long URL
Click to expand...
Good question, I would stick to ASCII characters as much as possible.

For example, if you have a page with the keyword "food" in Thai writing, you would want it to look like this:

example.com/อาหาร

However, URLs can only be transmitted on the internet with ASCII characters.

So your final URL will look like this if you use Thai characters:

example.com/%E0%B8%AD%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A3

So what's the solution?

Use only ASCII characters.

Now, I don't know Thai, but if Google Translate is any good, it tells me food is spelled like this: Xāh̄ār

What's the clostest in ASCII?

xahar

Final URL: example.com/xahar

----

You should really find a Thai SEO and ask them too though, this method works well for me in Swedish but I cannot speak for all languages :)
 
IM Dude said:
Makes sense. I gotta adopt to topical authority. Blogging is not like before. Now it's rank fast, cash out and get out. I use a group buy of semrush, i check what people are searching. They are going after high volume keywords, days of Longtail are getting over.
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Do you have a writeup were you discuss in detail about this? Or how did you deduce all of this?
 
Dark Hat 007 said:
Do you have a writeup were you discuss in detail about this? Or how did you deduce all of this?
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You asking about what? I said multiple things there. Topical authority, semrush group buy, what people are searching.
 
tattooedbuddha said:
Good question, I would stick to ASCII characters as much as possible.

For example, if you have a page with the keyword "food" in Thai writing, you would want it to look like this:

example.com/อาหาร

However, URLs can only be transmitted on the internet with ASCII characters.

So your final URL will look like this if you use Thai characters:

example.com/%E0%B8%AD%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A3

So what's the solution?

Use only ASCII characters.

Now, I don't know Thai, but if Google Translate is any good, it tells me food is spelled like this: Xāh̄ār

What's the clostest in ASCII?

xahar

Final URL: example.com/xahar

----

You should really find a Thai SEO and ask them too though, this method works well for me in Swedish but I cannot speak for all languages :)
Click to expand...
Great method,I don't hear that before

So that's you tell we should use in ASCII okay

I think in another case
If I use ASCII in "food" keyword ( อาหาร )
It's will ex.com/xahar
In this case why Google know it must transmitted in Thai ASCII
and why Google don't think for my keyword is "xahar" not "อาหาร"

I seen another way is use "karaoke language" you know it?
If who don't know that , it use how to pronounce that word
Ex karaoke.
อาหาร(food) = ahar it's can pronounce "a-har"
สวัสดี(hello) = sawaddee it's can pronounce "sa-wad-dee"

So if use in karaoke way for อาหาร (food) is keyword
It will be
Ex.com/ahar
and can be
Ex.com/a-har

But I don't know about the performance, i don't know how to compaire them
What do you think of that?
 
So is necessary at that point to add /en/ or whatever the language is right behind the domain? (example: something.com/th/อาหาร) or just (something.com/อาหาร)? Thank you :)
 
kidfang1995 said:
Great method,I don't hear that before

So that's you tell we should use in ASCII okay

I think in another case
If I use ASCII in "food" keyword ( อาหาร )
It's will ex.com/xahar
In this case why Google know it must transmitted in Thai ASCII
and why Google don't think for my keyword is "xahar" not "อาหาร"

I seen another way is use "karaoke language" you know it?
If who don't know that , it use how to pronounce that word
Ex karaoke.
อาหาร(food) = ahar it's can pronounce "a-har"
สวัสดี(hello) = sawaddee it's can pronounce "sa-wad-dee"

So if use in karaoke way for อาหาร (food) is keyword
It will be
Ex.com/ahar
and can be
Ex.com/a-har

But I don't know about the performance, i don't know how to compaire them
What do you think of that?
Click to expand...
I would not rely on "karaoke language", as long as your page's hreflang is correct, you'll most likely do just fine with "xahar" for the keyword of food.

dinozd said:
So is necessary at that point to add /en/ or whatever the language is right behind the domain? (example: something.com/th/อาหาร) or just (something.com/อาหาร)? Thank you :)
Click to expand...
Unless you are planning to offer content in multiple languages, adding for example a /en/ or /th/ is unnecessary. You use the hreflang attribute on the page to show search engines what language and geographic location you are targeting :)
 
tattooedbuddha said:
This case study might help you, cost of retrieval is not exclusive to URLs.

What it essentially boils down to is this: crawling and indexing cost money, make it as cheap as possible for search engines to crawl and understand your content. This thread shows you how to optimize your URLs to do this :)
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I didn't see anywhere in that post that discussed slugs/url structure as applying to Google's crawl budget. I've never seen any proof that a particular URL structure gets more pages indexed (outside of obviously bad ones, e.g. non-descriptive, non-unique on the site, too short, keyword spammed, etc.), if you have any, it would be great to see.

I've experimented with various structures on sites with over 50k pages and saw no differences. The things that actually improved indexation was things like improving page load speed, improving accessibility (primarily using ideal color contrast), good internal linking, and some mixed results with removing published dates (this worked well in the past but doesn't seem to have much effect if any now).

I've even experimented with serving up gzipped sitemaps to greatly reduce the sitemap size and time/bandwidth to download it and saw no effect from that.

If you look at successful SEO content farms like Quora, they don't break page titles/key phrases into subdirectories, they use a structure like: https://www.quora.com/How-bad-was-the-US-Civil-War

I don't see how the Quora structure costs more of Google's crawl budget vs splitting the words with forward slashes, but if it does, a proper test would have to be done to demonstrate it.
 
kidfang1995 said:
Thx for your guild
What about if keyword and articles we write it in other languages,
we should translate in to eng or we should use that language

Becuz when we use other languages ex. Thai it turn to other and it will be very long URL
Click to expand...
Use the actual alphabet of that language and ASCII encode it. All modern browsers will automatically decode the ASCII encoding back into the UTF-8 or Unicode characters and Google will as well for display.

Trying to translate a language into an English equivalent to use ASCII characters will result in translation errors that, at best, wouldn't help your SEO and at worst, would let you miss out on the small boost of having the intended words in the URL.
 
Good guide. Url structure plays an important role in ranking.
 
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