Saturday, September 24, 2011

Why Not To Use Numbers In URLs?

It was a so called myth that search engine robots can't read Dynamic urls, but as it appears Dynamic urls are somewhat better than Static urls. In between the contrast of Static Vs Dynamic URLs, dynamic urls are mostly preferred by the Google's search quality team.As for examples, a static url will look like this:  www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3/98971298178906/URL, whereas, a dynamic url will look like this: http://example.com/my-name-is.html or http://example.com/my-name-is/. So, you can see the difference between them that a dynamic url allocates a content with words, and a static url allocates a content with number (in simple understanding). As web-masters say, these static urls mostly create problems for the search engine robots.



Another problem of having numbers in url is: they don't really work at all! As an example, in the picture below, while I searched for the number "3", the search engine result had shown me a bunch of "three"! How funny!



So, numbers in url do not help your page at all to acquire a higher position in the Search Engine Results Page.


However, there's another controversial behavior of search engine robots. Sometimes, the algorithm may choose other numbers! This types of random number choosing is not that highly seen, but rarely it happens when you search with sort-of unique number. As an example, I have searched with "4 steps to heaven", but search engine replied me with the picture below (though it's not the first two results, but they are on the first page).


Unfortunately, this time it replied with "Seven Steps to Heaven". I accept that: this may happen because the wikipedia page "Seven Steps to Heaven" has way more backlinks than any other pages on that SERP, but however, when it comes to relevancy, it's misdirection of numbers.

Yet Again, It's SEVEN and not 7!


In the end, I would not tell you to not to use numbers in URLs, in fact, I would like to tell you that if it is necessary to use numbers in url, then use the letter format of that number instead of using the number. Because, as I have said at the starting of this post, a word can navigate the search engine robots effectively than a number itself does.


Note: For wordpress users it's easy to edit an url, but for bloggers - it's not. So for bloggers (who are using blogger), publish the post - making the Title like: "My Example Post Four" and by then, edit the title (after publishing) to make it like: "My Example Post 4".