How important are SEF url's?

[gregmp]

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Probably a very stupid question for most people on here but my web programmer told me 'it didn't make that much difference' having SEF url's although since then I have read much to the contrary. My CMS is Joomla and although there is a patch that makes the url's SEF I have also been advised this means starting all over again with SEO and google page rank. Any advice would be appreciated.

[DavidCartlidge]

Depends on your definition of 'search engine friendly'.

Companies that sell software that create URLs that _dont_ contain keywords, but are within the SERPS will state that their software produces 'SEF' urls (as they are indexed)

Some people will tell you that without the 'keywords-in-the-url' the url is not SEF.

In reality you should use 'keywords-in-the-url' as it is far better for your site visitors and because there is a benefit to your ranking, it may be slight, perhaps very slight - but it is more than none.

If you have established pages indexed using singlepage?ref=1234 or similar and you can't do a 301 redirect for them all, you may be better to leaev them as they are.

[Brendon]

Keyword in the URL is great, but not essential (HTML title and link data far outweigh it). Not having dynamic URLs is helpful (static, or apparently static sites tend to get crawled more frequently and deeper - but then microsoft.com does OK. But it IS microsoft.com...)

If you can 301 the old URLs to the new ones, I'd do it - you'll retain the old link juice.

[gregmp]

Thanks to both of you for the advice - I think I'm able to do a 301 redirect (even though have no idea what it actually means!) but I have read that redirected urls are frowned upon by google - or is this a different thing?

[DavidCartlidge]

That is different. A permanent 301 redirect is simply telling the search engines that one page has been permanently moved but the content is the same. That last bit is not actually what it means, but to maximinse the chances of retaining the ranking for that page it is best to not change the content until the page is indexed.

[moredial]

SEF just means that there are no ? & and blank spaces in the URLs. If the info is important for SEO then it needs to be at root level or down one directory level if your site has subsections.

Root level usually gets indexed more often and once you get down to 3 levels deep you will be struggling to get the URLs indexed.

The simple solution is to use joomla with its 6 or more levels of SEF urls for all the 'stuff' and put all the meat for SEs in static pages at the root level, linked from the site map.