URL parameters
Key-value pairs after a question mark in a URL; they frequently create duplicate content and crawl waste when they do not change page…
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URL structure
The design of a site's URL paths: readable, stable, lowercase, hyphen-separated and free of unnecessary parameters or session identifiers.
In full
URLs are a weak ranking signal but a strong usability and maintenance one: they appear in results and share previews, they determine what breaks during migrations, and consistent patterns make crawl analysis and log segmentation possible. Google recommends simple, descriptive URLs with hyphens as word separators, and warns against non-ASCII characters unless properly percent-encoded. Changing URLs always costs something, so stability is worth more than perfect keywords.
Example
`/running-shoes/trail/model-x` rather than `/p.php?cid=44&pid=9182&sess=8f2a`.
Related terms
Site architecture
How a site's URLs, navigation and internal links are organised into a hierarchy that users and crawlers can traverse efficiently.
301 redirect
A server-side permanent redirect that tells crawlers a URL has moved for good and that ranking signals should consolidate on the…
Internationalised domain name
A domain name containing non-ASCII characters, encoded for DNS as ASCII Punycode beginning with `xn--`.
Canonicalization
The process by which a search engine groups duplicate or near-duplicate URLs into a cluster and picks one representative URL to index and…
Where to read more
- RFC 3986: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) Generic Syntax · Standard · rfc-editor.org
- SEO Best Practices for Ecommerce Sites · Documentation · developers.google.com