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 |  | | Will changing URLs on some pages hurt SERP? | Posted By: ROFLjuice
Okay so, I'm stupid when it comes to stuff like this. Let's say my website is about pants, and the website is xyzblah.com. One of the pages, if you wanted to buy some pants, would be xyzblah.com/buysomepants. Now, I've had it named that way for 2 years.
After reading up on anchor text, and how the name of a url shouldn't throw together words, but separate them with hyphens like buy-some-pants, I wanted to change the url from xyzblah.com/buysomepants to xyzblah.com/buy-some-pants. This would help anchor texting to it easier to do, right?
Will changing something like that hurt how Search Engines rank you, especially if I want to do it to other pages on the site besides the buysomepants one?
» Reply to this Post | |  Tuesday, November 11, 2008
When something seemingly insignificant is able to control a more powerful entity, talk of the tail wagging the dog occasionally comes into play. But according to a new report from Hitwise, the long tail of search is capable of something more akin to launching the dog into orbit.
Editor's Note: Fresh statistics suggest that what's previously been called the long tail has the power to bring in far more traffic than top search terms. Has this been the case in your experience? Speak up and let us know which end of the search term scale tends to grab your attention.
» Give us your comments! 
Dustin Woodard, a Seattle-based SEO and Web analytics expert, tried to look at the top 10000 search terms recorded by Hitwise during a three-month period. What he got was a very strange-looking graph, with data displayed in almost invisible amounts along great stretches of both axes.
 " Top 10,000 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic" (Source: Hitwise)
So Woodard then examined just the top 100 terms, and this sample generated a graph more normal in appearance. He writes, "However, this is just 100 search terms out of the more than 14 million."
It turns out that, at least in this particular three-month data set, the top 100 terms accounted for just 5.7 percent of all search traffic. Expand to the top 500, 1000, and 10000 terms, and just 8.9 percent, 10.6 percent, and 18.5 percent of all search traffic is involved, respectively.
 "Top 100 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic" (Source: Hitwise)
Woodard concludes, "This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you'd still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There's so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles."
Lone bloggers, SEO professionals, and small businesses (among all other sorts of things) should be able to take comfort in this discovery. Woodard's analysis makes it look like there's plenty of traffic for everyone, without a need for cutthroat behavior and the spending of huge sums of money over the top few search terms.
A better approach might be to optimize for a lot of truly niche terms and see what happens. Be careful not to confuse increased holiday traffic for success - and also not to put your holiday income at risk in the event of failure - but some small-scale testing seems appropriate, at least.
Anyone wanting even more reasons to experiment should know that the Hitwise sample only included 10 million U.S. Internet users, adult search terms were removed by filters, and the three spotlighted months were relatively slow ones.
About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news. | |
Below are the meatier results, with the straightest answers given first, followed by responses that were a bit on the ambiguous side, which we took the liberty of translating. Did you know there are about 200 factors that go into determining a site’s ranking in the search results? How about that Google made 450 tweaks to its algorithm last year? 
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