Half’s SEO Notebook

A few days ago, John Scott blogged that Google doesn’t parse keywords in urls. I was previously told by many reputable webmasters that Google can parse common keywords in urls. Here’s what would seem to be an indisputable proof: searching for “search engine optimization” returns searchenginewatch.com, with the words search engine in the domain name highlighted. So that proves Google does parse keywords in urls, right?

Wrong. John Scott’s tests demystify this notion completely. He points out that highlighting does not mean parsing. Even for common keywords like “sexual frustration”, Google fails to parse them in URLs.

Another proof is this search for the word “fun” on this site. If Google recognized the word fun in the domain name, it would return all pages in the domain; instead, it returns only the home page, which is the only page that contains the word fun on the page.

This teaches me a couple of things: 1) Never blindly buy into what an authority says 2) When in doubt, test it out =)