Do Search Engines Look at Keywords in URL?

As you know search engines algorithms look at over 100 criteria. If you read forums about Search Engine Optimization, you will see that some SEO recommend to use keywords in URL and other claim it is useless. The problem is that no one have made real test (or have not published it?). We have decided to run some tests in order to make sure that words in URL is one criteria for search engines algorithms.

Below are the tests we made

As we were only focused on one item (keyword in URL) we have decided:

• To create webpages with the same look and feel of our other webpages
• To create webpages with the "word" rkpatjfg in the URL (directories and file names)
• To avoid the word rkpatjfg in the body text and head text of these pages
• To link to these new pages without using the word rkpatjfg in the anchor text

Before we started our test, we searched for rkpatjfg in Google, MSN beta, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Teoma, WiseNut, Exalead (AOL.fr) and Voila. There were no results on these search engines.

A few days later, Google, MSN beta and Exalead indexed our new web pages. Yahoo! also indexed one of them. So we did the same search for rkpatjfg on these search engines.

Results

See all the results in our search engine ranking report.

• Google, MSN (beta), Yahoo! and Exalead take into account the words in the URL.
• The other search engines (Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Teoma, WiseNut and Voila) have not yet crawled our webpages so at this time we do not know yet. Anyway, as soon as their spider crawls our webpages we will update this article.