What is URL friendliness?
- URLs should be structured (when possible) to be clean, short, memorable, and shareable.
- User experience signals (SERP click-through rate in particular) are increasingly important ranking factors. Short, clean, and readable URLs drive more SERP clicks than non-friendly URLs.
- For example, which would you click?
- http://site.com/cute/10-cutest-puppies-ever/
- http://site.com/9dfshre/?324323/10sfd-fscutest-pfdsuppies-sdfever/
How can I check my URLs
- In Screaming Frog, run a crawl of your website.
- Set the tab to “URI”.
- Export data to Excel and analyze.
- It could be a CMS issue forcing URLs into unfriendly states. If URLs are human-generated, you should recommend creating a URL structuring guide for those pushing URLs live to ensure friendliness going forward.
- Consider changing extremely unfriendly for cleaner ones, 301 redirect old into the new.