Does URL Structure Even Matter? A Data Driven Answer
URL structure has been debated within the SEO industry for years. From the number of subdirectories to the placement of keywords in URLs, SEOs have tried many optimization techniques to improve their sites’ rankings.
The real question is, does your URL structure even help with your overall traffic? To answer this question, we decided to do some research to help you make a data-informed decision.
Extraneous characters
Sometimes you see strange characters in URLs such as &, %, $, and @. It is more difficult for search engines to crawl websites if their URLs contain many of these extraneous characters.
If you doubt whether extraneous characters are important, consider that Google has even gone on record to state that you should be using dashes over underscores because it affects how their search engine reads the keywords in your URL. For instance: