Google Changes URLs: How Website URL Display Updates Affect Your SEO
Google announced significant changes to how they represent URLs in search results. Specifically, Google changes URLs display by showing a website's actual name instead of its URL, whilst presenting the URL structure as breadcrumbs. Moreover, these updates particularly impact mobile search results, making website URL optimisation more crucial than ever.
What Is a Website URL?
With Hypertext and HTTP, URL represents one of the key concepts of the Web. Furthermore, it serves as the mechanism used by browsers to retrieve any published resource on the web. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. Additionally, a URL is nothing more than the address of a given unique resource on the Web.
Quoting Google: Well-structured URLs offer users a quick hint about the page topic and how the page fits within the website. To help mobile searchers understand your website better when we show it in the mobile search results, today we're updating the algorithms that display URLs in the search results to better reflect the names of websites, using the real-world name of the site instead of the domain name, and the URL structure of the sites in a breadcrumbs-like format.
How Google Changes URLs Impact Mobile Search Results
This change means that your site's URL structure becomes even more important than it already was in the SEO and marketing world. Consequently, ugly URLs will be even more visible in the search results than before. However, these changes specifically target mobile search results, with updates rolling out to mobile search gradually.
Notably, site name display changes are currently US-only, whilst website breadcrumbs are rolling out worldwide. Additionally, Google announced support for schema.org structured data. Therefore, websites can signal algorithms on how to handle the substitution of website names and URL structures.
Why URL Structure SEO Matters More Than Ever
We all know that smartphone penetration continues growing. Moreover, Google says smartphone penetration increases every year, with searching on small screens becoming commonplace. As a result, the part of the result that shows you a page URL isn't always very helpful on smartphones. Furthermore, anything but the top-level domain will probably be truncated.
Especially within familiar sites, the mixture of the page title and shortened URL may leave you unclear about what part of the website you will navigate to once you click. Therefore, Google is making a subtle change to clear things up.
The Impact on Site Name Display and Brand Recognition
These changes mean that whatever you choose as your brand name is reflected more in the search results. Consequently, you have to think really hard about what you want that to be. However, whether this change positively or negatively impacts keyword-rich domain names remains to be seen.
Nevertheless, on-page SEO has never been more important than now! Therefore, implementing proper On-page SEO strategies becomes essential for maximising these Google changes URLs benefits.