Does apparent filename affect SEO?

Question

If I name my HTML file "Banks.html" located at www.example.com/Banks.html, but all the content is about Cats and all my other SEO tags are about Cats on the page, will it affect my page's SEO?

Can you name your files whatever you want, as long as you have the page title, description, and the rest of the SEO done properly?

Answer 1

Page name doesn't affects much in terms of SEO. but naming a page is also one of the Google 200 SEO signals.

Naming a url different sure will reduce your bounce rate a little. Because any user comes to your site through organic search results doesn't understand what the page has.

Even search engines loves when a page name is relevant to the topic in the page.

Answer 2

Today algorithm is totally different when the SEO was introduce. The seo today is about content and its quality. It must produce a good reader and follower so any filename and description are no longer important.

Answer 3

Google's PageRank algo has hundreds, thousands or even millions of variables and factors. From this point of view, you can be sure that the name of the files that you use on your website will affect your pagerank and/or your keyword targeting. Think about it.

Answer 4

From any point of view, Google and all search engines like to see a coherence between everything: if you have a page named XYZ, then google will like it better if the text, meta, images, url, documents, etc, on the page to have XYZ in them. The bigger this synchronisation between the different elements on a page, the more the search engine sees how focused the content of that page is, resulting in more hits for you when someone looks up that focused search term.

If you have an image for example, you're better off having the same:

• caption
• description
• name
• alt text

(wordpress users will recognize that these are the four parameters that can be set for images on wordpress).

The same goes for all files you have on your website. Any parameter that can be seen by a search engine is better of optimized in regards to the content that goes with it, in sync with all the other parameters of this same thing.

The question of how useful this all is arises afterwards. Will I really rank lower if my alt text is different than the name of my image? Probably not by a lot. But either way, taking advantage of small subtleties like these can take you a long way in SEO. There are so many things we can't control in SEO (or that we shouldn't be able to control, like backlinks), that we have to use what we can control in the best way possible, to compensate.

It's also hard to tell if it is all useful after the Google Panda and Penguin. It definitely has less of an impact ever since those reforms (back then, this kind of thing was crucial), the question is simply how much of an impact it still has. But all in all, as I said, whenever possible, name your files according to your content.

Answer 5

There are few on-page elements that have significance. The URL, while it can be /234989782 is going to be more beneficial if it's named relevantly.

Answer 6

It shouldn't affect your search engine ranking, but it may influence people who, having completed a search on Google (or some of the other great search engines, like um...uh...), are now scanning the results to decide where to click first. Someone faced with a url like www.dummy.com/banks.html would be more likely to click than someone faced with www.dummy.com/default.php?p_id=1&sessid=876492u942fgspw24z because most people haven't a clue what the last part means. It's also more memorable and gives people greater faith in getting back to the same site if you write your URLs nicely. No one that isn't Dustin Hoffman can remember the second URL without a little intense memory training, while everyone can remember banks.html. Just make sure your URL generation is consistent and your rewriting is solid, so you don't end up with loads of page not found errors which can detriment search engine ranking.

Answer 7

Under circumstances this can be considered a black-hat SEO technique. Watch out not to be caught or reported by curious users.

Answer 8

Naming your pages something meaningful is a good idea and does improve SEO. It's another hint to the search engines what the page is about, in addition to the title and content. You would be surprised if you opened a file on your computer called "Letter to Grandma.doc" and it was actually your tax return!

In general, the best URLs are those that simply give a page name and hierarchical structure, without extensions or ID numbers. Keep it lowercase and separate words with dashes, like this:

example.com/my-cats
or
example.com/cats/mittens

In your case you will probably wanna keep the .html extension to avoid complexities with URL rewriting.

Answer 9

Page names are often not very representative of the page content (I've seen pages named 7d57As09). Therefore search engines are not going to be particularly upset if the page names appear misleading. However, it's likely that the page name is one of many factors a search engine considers.

If there's no disadvantage in naming a page about cats, "cats.html", then do so! If it doesn't help your SEO, it will make it easier for your visitors!

Answer 10

Ideally, your page name should be relevant to the content of the page - so your ranking may improve if you call the page "cats.html", as that is effectively another occurrence of the keyword in the page.

Generally, this is fairly minor compared to the benefits of decent keywords, titles, etc on the page. For more information take a look at articles around Url Strategy, for example:

"I’ve heard that search engines give some weighting to pages which contain keywords users are searching for which are contained within the page URL?"

Answer 11

If you want to be on better place when someone searchs for 'banks', then yes, it can help you. But unless you are creating pages about cats in banks I'm sure that this wont help you very much :)