URL structure

Length of URL : no more than 3-5 words in your URL. Recent research shows that short URL within SERP get clicked twice  as compared to short URL. So if you have short URL then you get better rankings  and better clicks

Dashes are better than underscore: Dashes are more preferable because Google sees each hyphened as an individual one.

 

Example : If you have a URL like word1_word2, now Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2.If you have a URL like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1,word2 and even “word1word2”.

URL is case sensitive: most of the time people are most likely to the standard lower case one and you might both lose link juice and suffer duplicate content issues.

Moving to static URL structure: my (and actually not only my) favorite tactic is to use 301 redirect only for most powerful (in terms of linking and traffic) pages and leave all others to be handled via 404.

If you hesitate if your URLs may be perceived as spammy, check out SEOMOZ URL Spam Detection Tool that will estimate:

• spam words;
• hyphens;
• subdomain depth;
• domain length;
• digits.

Mind your file extensions (i.e. don’t end your URLs with .exe) as they might prevent your pages from crawling.

Related post