Urls
Url stands for Uniform Resource Locator. which specifies the location of a web resource on the network. It tells the browser about the address of the web page requested.
There are 4 main parts of urls
Protocol (Scheme) : The very first part of urls is protocol. Protocol tells the browser how to interact with the server to fetch resources. Some of the common protocols used as:
- Http : Http is a client-server protocol used to fetch resources like HTML documents, images,s, etc.
- Https: This is an HTTP secure protocol used for secure communication over the network.
- FTP : file transfer protocol.
Domain name: Domain is a unique identification string. It should be a human-friendly address so that people will remember it while typing on the address bar.
Port : port is used after TLD separated by a colon (:). In most cases, it's 80 used with HTTP and 443 used with HTTPS if not declared.
Path: It shows the specific location of the requested file on a web server. The path may include a hierarchy of directories to locate a particular file.
Example :
Url : https://www.quizcure.com/seo/friendly-urls-structure
Where:
- https is a protocol. Secure HTTP.
- quizcure Domain name.
- .com TLD (Top-level domain)
- Path seo/friendly-urls-structure
- Directory seo
- Web Page name friendly-urls-structure
Scroll for More Useful Information and Relevant FAQs
- Should I include target keyword in url?
- What should be used to Separate the words in the url? Hyphen (-) or underscore (_) or dashes ( - )?
- Does it matters if Trailing slashes added after domain name?
- Trailing slash and non-trailing slash URLs showing same content. Does it cause duplicate content for search engines?
- should i check plagiarism?
- Feedback: Your input is valuable to us. Please provide feedback on this article.
Should I include target keyword in url?
Yes. Should be.
We should design user user-friendly page URL. It means that if we see a URL we will know what the page is about
A well-structured URL introduces the page. Introducing keywords in URL is the Best practice
Example :
Target keyword : mens sports shoes
Wrong urls:
1. www.domainName.com/page.php?id=7897
Reason : There are no keywords introduced in url. Also, it is not user friendly URL.
2. www.domainName.com/sports/mens/mens-footwear/running-shoes/sport-shoes.html
Reason: It's better than point#1 but it includes repetitive keywords which is not good for search engines and should be avoided.
Good urls:
1. www.domainName.com/mens-sports-shoes
Reason : Seo friendly url. the keyword is not repetitive and easy to understand
2. www.domainName.com/mens/sports-shoes
Reason : Directory based urls. Here by looking into url, we can predict that all men's stuff is grouped into the directory mens.
What should be used to Separate the words in the url? Hyphen (-) or underscore (_) or dashes ( - )?
Hyphen (-)
Hyphens should be used to separate words in the URL. Hyphen is recommended to use in URLs rather than underscore or dashes. Most of the search engines treat hyphens as word separators.
Let's understand actual meaning & usage of following
- Dashes: Dashes include space on either side while using it to make statements. URLs should now have spaces therefore dashes are not recommended for use in URLs. Yes, you may use dashes without space in the URL, and in such cases, it's the hyphen.
- Underscore : Used to combine two words. As per RFC 1035 Underscore (_) is not permitted in domain name too. It's not recommended to use Underscore in URLs.
- Hyphen : hyphens are used to separate words in urls. It makes the URL cleaner and easy to read and understand. Also using a hyphen in the URL helps better position the web page in the search result than underscore. Therefore hyphen is highly recommended for use in web page URLs.
Not Recommended: https://www.quizcure.com/seo/friendly_urls_structure
Url is combined by using an underscore. Therefore it is not recommended.
Recommended urls: https://www.quizcure.com/seo/friendly-urls-structure
Url is combined by using a hyphen. Therefore it is recommended.
Does it matters if Trailing slashes added after domain name?
There is no issue if Trailing slashes are added after the domain name.
So, https://www.quizcure.com is same as https://www.quizcure.com/
Trailing slash and non-trailing slash URLs showing same content. Does it cause duplicate content for search engines?
Yes same content on both pages having URLs with slash and no slash can cause issues with duplicate content IF not handled properly.
Urls ending with a trailing slash indicate a directory and Urls ending with no trailing slash indicate a file. Therefore it creates confusion for users and search engines if they see the same content on both pages.
Canonical tags can help to avoid duplication. Canonical tag rel= "canonical" used to tell crawlers about the true version of the page.
