For instance, a url on reddit may be:
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ea7ee/what_would_the_horizon_look_like_if_you_were/
while a link on HN looks like:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11465163
For HN, I get the impression that they don't really want to be all that optimized for Google, so it probably hits their goals just fine, but it probably does hurt them a little bit. But since the words are in an H1 right at the top, probably not all that much.
Edit: The code in case anyone is interested:
https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/cfd979fa0119191257eadc...
You wrote that code almost 8 years ago[1]. Google and other search engines have changed a lot since then. Who knows if this has any impact today?
Actually did you even A/B test it at the time? Or just turn it on along with a bunch of other changes?
It's hard to tell, and there's so much SEO (mis)information out there based on old anecdotes, and all the players doing A/B testing for this sort of thing on a big scale keep their data to themselves.
Also, SEO is not supposed to be easy, Google purposely makes it hard. They don't want you to be successful (with good reason).
They've always said, make good content that easy for a human to find and Google will find it too.
That's probably the best SEO advice you can get.
These days most tests are run by buying two domains that are a combination of random letters/numbers, setting up two nearly identical sites, and doing identical linkbuilding to both - then seeing which one ranks higher.
It's not exactly scholastic research quality, but repeated enough times it gives you an idea of what's working "right now".
Not a perfect test, but with enough links, it would have been a good indicator.
You would probably have to clone the earth to find that.
It's easy to code
Is there an SEO impact?
Probably, but as SEO is search engine optimization, if a site doesn't care about search engines, then it also probably doesn't care about optimization of those searches.
And in this case its actually a good thing. If you scroll through the /new pages as I do you will see that a lot of people try to use HN like Reddit as an SEO tool to get more views to their web site. That can be facilitated by a link baity headline cum URI which gets indexed with the keywords of interest of the day.
By simply putting 'itemid' in the link text HN gives very little "link love" to keywords and so is not as easily exploited by "digital presence" folks (aka people who try to SEO their client's sites or products).
https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=seo+actual+title&ie=U...
You keep saying exact query match, but commenter above used 3 non-consecutive words out of the 12 words in the title, and did not use any sort of quoted search text.
Indeed, it even works with just two words out of the title:
https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+actual
The point being that HN's use of just the id in the URL has a minimal, if any, effect on search ranking.
Only said it once =/
> The point being that HN's use of just the id in the URL has a minimal, if any, effect on search ranking.
A single data point absolutely does not indicate whether the id in the URL affects SEO or not. Your Google search is context specific (to you) so I would certainly expect it to show up near or at the top. But what about those who have never touched that page or even have gone to HN? The more specific the title the better overall but none of this gives us data about the id in the URL being good or bad for SEO.
Likely I think it's more of a UX than an SEO thing. But still don't go off a context specific, single data point to decide whether something is true in general or not.
New VM at aws, no previous Google searches. Still #2.
Any source for that?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL#Slug
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=Ask+HN%3A+SEO+impact+of+HN%2...
It's well know that pg doesn't want this site to have mainstream appeal, so having HN articles list high in search engines would probably be a problem they would want to avoid, but also, submitters shouldn't have an incentive to use this site to boost their own SEO by submitting low-quality linkspam.
If it were me, I would go even further and route every link through a dereferring proxy just to mess with their analytics as well, and block everyone except maybe IA through robots.txt. For a site which is meant to be about discussion and thought-provoking stories and not content aggregation for the sake of ad revenue, I think SEO is a cancer.
What is the reasoning behind only an itemid in the URL for HN?
Like someone previously mentioned, easier to code, less thought required around site architecture and optimization
Is there an SEO impact? Yes, from a basic standpoint, descriptive URLs are easier to crawl, index, and rank accordingly. They help readers find info better when searching for questions + answers
From a more highlevel standpoint, descriptive URLs and an optimized site structure helps in many ways including SEO, analytics, accessibility, and more. Reddit does it well
The reason is because it's the minimum information required to do the job. HN was built to function by PG who built it old school as a demonstration of his custom programming language, it's clearly not been optimized for SEO and putting a slug in the URL adds nothing functionally and thus the engineer had no reason to add that feature. It also uses tables for layout, has embedded style information, and saves all state to files on disk using no database. It's hardly a "best practices" type application.
Why are they easier to crawl and index? Most people do shoot themselves in the foot with some duplicate content if they try to implement those speaking URLs.
And "rank accordingly"? Like keyword tags help to rank better?
However, if your overall site structure is one that has topics and subtopics or categories and subcategories, it would help the user see that site structure. For example, in the reddit example above, users can get directly to the askscience subreddit by removing part of the URL and going directly to https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/. Setting up URLs like this is a good practice, the URL would then follow the site's breadcrumb trail.
For H/N, I don't really see any benefit, at this point, for using keywords in the URLs. There's just no SEO benefit.
- Shorter urls are easier to copy and share.
+ Keywords in the url may increase search engine rank.
+ Full title in the url helps readers know what they're clicking.
There are advantages to having the full title in the url for both SEM and readers. However, as others mention, HN wasn't designed for SEM and contains no ads to profit from it.
Almost every website I've seen lets you re-write the url. For example,
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4eaqjb/something
and
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/4eaqjb/anything
both go to the same link.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11472694&title=ask-hn-s...
My impression is that this would be a simple way to produce a RESTful interface. When the resource is a file on disk, how complex does application layer routing have to be?
Anyway, my guess is that general SEO is not particularly high on the list of features to implement. On the other hand, if adding Algolia and the API then it's another story. That was also a substantial improvement to the feature set. It might even turn up the aforementioned discussion about the file system hierarchy [I think PG wrote the post].
Good luck.
The URL structure isn't always that important, but it helps.
If that's the case then all else aside the answer to the question being asked is, "Yes, there is an impact" and perhaps "but it's not significant enough to justify changing HN"
I doubt it's "I wish someone could tell me how to search for things on HN" more likely it's "Why did HN do it this way? Wouldn't it have been better this other way? Or perhaps is there nothing at all to be gained?" IOW the goal is to understand the motivation behind the different approaches between reddit and HN.
- Though it's not much more difficult, it does show you spent a little more effort on the website to not just leave the pk there. I would think this would be more relevant for sites not using a framework like wordpress (which we absolutely know from search results filters that google can categorize sites in this way...)
- Legacy... older websites that are pure static pages will likely have good keywords in the file name, since it would be maintained primarily by humans looking at directories of files.
- Social significance. The link would be more likely to have a better social impact because the content of the page could be determined whether its an anchor tag, posted in irc, or sent in gmail. You might argue that just because the page name has the keywords doesnt mean the content is about that, but I would argue google can quickly detect and demote those kind of things (aka the page title is only really relevant to your seo if it's also relevant to the content... otherwise it's essentially just a random primary key).
Just my thoughts...