: Does amount of URL parameters affect SEO? I've recently just finished building a small website and created friendly URLs using IIS7.5' rewrite module. The site has now been passed to the client's

@Ann8826881

This topic can be quiet debatable as stated. However, there are 2 general rules.


make the url simple understandable and relevant i.e
site.com/shop/pens is much better then site.com/this/shop/sells/pens?id=123123123
make the step to get to the desired location as short as possible


If you follow these two rules then regardless of if your url is "optimised" or not then it will not matter if your index page has a link to site.com/this/shop/sells/pens?id=123123123 the the link will have quiet a high relevance to your site (providing it sells stationary or your content is on a relevant subject.

If it takes your user 6 clicks to get to site.com/this/shop/sells/pens?id=123123123 then your user will probably get bored and look elsewhere. Hence why google will rank this lower then your first or second pages.

People may argue that site.com/shop/pens is far better then the prior example however if your site has already been designed and your pages have been ranked for a while do you want to risk loosing all of that pagerank and the age of the page simply to just make it "optimised". Maybe take an alternative route, make the clickable or viewable on your 1st page or your second page. If you start to use rewrite rules that give a 301 header then 2 things will happen. your traffic from a search engine will redirect the traffic to the new pages, then your old page will be de-indexed from google. It may then take another 2 or 3 weeks for google to re-index your new pages (providing you update the links on your site and don't just rely on the re-writes). You could then potentially loose 70% of traffic for the next couple of weeks.

I personally prefer to try and make 90% of your content clickable within the first 3 levels of your website. i.e the customer can access a certain page from no more then 3 clicks from one of the links on yours site.

Again this is a matter of opinion but what has worked for me doesn't mean that it will work for you.

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@Harper822

It is not the perceived depth of directory that google factors into rankings, urls with so called deep directories can be indexed and ranked just as shorter ones can. www.searchenginejournal.com/url-structure-seo/11801/
Though Google does recommend you keep urls as simple as possible. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en

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@Heady270

Is the SEO specialist right? Yes and no (or more appropriately, debateable).

That said, the closer you are to the root domain (in your example example.com) the better.

The lower down in the path you are, the less prominence Google will give to your page.

So in your example:
example.com/products/page_name/123

Is definitely the preferred way to do it, giving the user and Google enough information about the path, but keeping it short and simple as possible.

Source: Our internal Google Analytics and Search Expert

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