Pretty URLs... do they matter?

[nymbot]

Given the following urls:

example.com/warriors/ninjas/

example.com/warriors/ninjas/cid=WRS-NIN01

Is there any difference from an SEO perspective? Aesthetically the 2nd bugs me but that's not a statistical difference.

Thank you

[Michael-Goode]

Hey Tom,

Have a read of the following:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/url

[nymbot]

I read it, and the most relevant bit seems to be:

"Not ideally use parameters. If they need to be used the amount of parameters should be limited to two or fewer."

Is there any research that supports that 0 params is better then 1, and 1 is better than 2, etc?

[LukeHardiman]

Tom, there is undoubtedly a difference, speaking broadly in terms of the use of query strings - at the SEO level - and at the usability / customer retention level.

URLs that are easy to read are easier to remember and easier to copy-paste too - meaning more robust - less likely to break or get corrupted when run through text parsers.

Google is explicit about their preference for clean urls, and a clean url structure for your site as a whole. I'm not sure if this is relevant to where you're at with your particular project, but I always try build a site with a url schema that exposes the information architecture and content priority as much as possible, usually with important pages close to the site root.

If you have to use query strings - and of course they are sometimes unavoidable, or actually just the best tool for the job at hand - Google Webmaster Tools allows you to provide explicit classifications for each parameter. Personally I thought this was a great addition to their suite of tools.