Do keywords in url parameter count?

[webfeatseo]

I have a client who is on an older ecommerce platform that does not allow url rewrites in anyway. It would cost a ton of money to custom dev a solution.

Anyways right now they have set up a parameter on their product urls to at least get the keyword in there. My question is, will this keyword actually be counted since it is in a parameter?

An example url is

http://domain.com/Catalog.aspx?Level1=01&Level2=02&C=Product-name-here

Does this 'product-name-here' count as having the keyword in the url according to google?

[polarking]

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

There are useful posts in google webmaster tools.

[webfeatseo]

And that does not answer my question. I've already read that page.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Great question! Thanks for asking it here.

Short answer: yes, in most cases Google will see the keyword in your URL, as long as your parameters and crawling structures are configured correctly. (At this point, we have no reason to assume otherwise). But how much benefit you will see is debatable.

In truth, a URL with 3 parameters would be considered "overly-dynamic" and not ideal for SEO. There's a good chance Google isn't crawling that deep on your site and many of these may be missed. Check a few random URLs to see if Google has indexed them.

Also check Google Webmaster to make sure your crawling parameters are set right.

Here's the deal: Keywords this far out in a URL probably won't count for much in Google's algorythm. Any ranking boost you see will most likely be negligible. But this doesn't mean it's not worth it. You might get a rankings boost, and you also might see a higher Click-through rate in the SERPs as Google highlights keywords contained in the search query.

So what's the conclusion? Yes, adding keywords to the end of the URL is probably a good idea and you may see a small boost from it, but I wouldn't expect much more.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

[webfeatseo]

Thanks for the response. Everything is all setup and good to go.