Art Of Money

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Free SEO News has the results of a very interesting reverse engineering study by German website Sistrix (in German).

The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.

Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?

Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

* Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.

* Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don’t seem to have an effect.

* Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.

* Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.

* Keywords in the file path don’t seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.

* The file size doesn’t seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.

* It’s no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

Not really any big surprises here…except:

Keywords in the file path don’t seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites.

Do you realize that this means that the “common wisdom” of the WordPress permalinks structure, like the one I’ve used here on Art of Money

domain.com/category/article-title

…may be hurting your site’s search engine rankings.

One thing interesting about this to me is that James Brausch posted the same findings in his own Google reverse engineering product (now off the market). I own a copy of James’ report and spent considerable time studying it, but I found that particular fact too difficult to believe.

The other reason I didn’t use it is that I’m a stats-aholic and found it difficult to see a bunch of entries like this (p=12, p=234, p=34) in my logs and not be able to tell which actual stories they were.

Possible Reasons

The first possible reason for lower rankings is probably not that the keywords are in the URL, but simply that the URL is shorter.

If you consider the almost always the home page (just the plain domain.com) is the highest ranked page on any site, then it would follow logically that Google will favor shorter URLs as being “closer” to the domain root and therefore more important.

When using James’ other URL scoring tool, which I assume is based on the same data, there is a clear correlation between length of any URL and a lower score in ranking for a keyword.

The other most likely reason for the lower rankings of sites using keywords in URLs is that the technique has been used to death by spammers and Google’s algorithm has that data factored into it.

Is It Worth it To Switch Your Permalinks Structure?

That I can’t say. I do know that even if you have set up your site to use a custom permalinks structure as I gave as an example above, you can still use the default path in WordPress and it will go to the correct page.

For example this:

http://www.artofmoney.org/?p=400

and this:

http://www.artofmoney.org/tools/is-scambusting-an-online-goldmine/

but once you go back to the default structure the second URL will produce a 404 Page Not Found error.

There is a WordPress plugin called Permalinks Migration Plugin, designed to safely allow you to change your permalinks structure. (NOTE: I haven’t tried this plugin, so use at your own peril.)

Personally I find making these type of changes on an established site, VERY HIGH RISK but any new sites I create, I will likely pay attention to this ranking tip and not use a fancy custom URL structure.