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How important is URL structure in SEO? In Joomla, I see /index.php/ used a lot. Should the URL's be shortened?

  • SEO,inbound marketing,Joomla

  • Answer:

    There is an increasing mountain of data suggesting that the URL structure doesn't matter to your indexing and rank nearly as much as it once did (if at all). Personally, I'm still on the fence on this topic as I've had more than enough personal experience with the URL making a tremendous difference.  So consider my opinion in this regard moot.  However, the opportunity most frequently overlooked by SEOs is the user experience.  Search engines still show the URLs and there is an equal mountain of evidence from SEM and SEO that the URL that is shown matters.  People click on URLs that are most contextually relevant; the URL validates that the page will have what they want. So what would you click? http://domain.com/the-page-you-want/index.php http://domain.com/the-page-you-want It's a subtle difference but it makes a difference.  My mom has no idea what index.php means.

Paul O'Brien at Quora Visit the source

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I agree with that you should get rid of it if possible for user experience considerations. My experience shows this having a slight impact on search results. For the record, I use the extension SH404SEF http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef/10134 to make SEO-friendly URLs for Joomla websites. You can get rid of the index.php issue and this component also resolves a lot of duplicate content issues created by Joomla. Setup and maintenance can be rather technical though so don't jump in unless you are thoroughly researched. Another point to consider, if the URLs are already indexed with the /index.php then it may not be worth the trouble to redirect. Massive redirections like that can be tricky and if you make a mistake it can cause a lot more harm than simply having index.php in the URL ever could.

Kyle Deming

It's not necessary to shorten the URL to make it look better. Search engines will only have problems in crawling dynamic URLs (URLs which have %329%?$ etc weired symbols and numbers). Nowadays Google is trying to make the URL presence on the SERP very small. A few days before I did a search for my name and my linkedin profile came up at #3, what I found was that there was no full URL of the linkedin profile, It was just mentioned as "Linkedin" when I got my cursor on the title of the profile then it showed me the exact URL, so the URL presence on the SERP is getting shortened by Google itself. Also, If you are having breadcrumbs in your website to show exact URL path of a particular search to search engines then it would be best for you as once SE will crawl your entire website after breadcrumbs are implemented, SE will randomly start showing your website URLs in a breadcrumb navigation format. Regarding the example of /index.php/ in joomla sites, I want to point out that, all the forums created on ExpressionEngine platform are having /index.php/ in their URLs and they are performing well too, so there is no harm having /index.php/ either way. (I'm not sure if it is in Joomla)

Pratik Dholakiya

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