What makes a URL both SEO and user friendly??? A URL should be short, easy to remember and should contains important keywords that completely explains the content of that page. So here is the answer, what we in naukri.com do to achieve this.

Some of the process we follow to create different URLs for every search:

1. Important Keywords in URL

URLs must contain important keywords or information that a user might be looking for, also the keywords you are targeting for which your page should come in Google search result. So, first we try to extract keywords and location on which user wants to perform search and ignore all other words.

For example in keyword field we replace some meaning less words with null string.

2. Remove stop words

Stop words are very common words or adjectives that can hinder your SEO efforts. Words such as, ‘of ‘, ‘the’ etc. interfere with your SEO efforts because they use up precious character space i.e. they make your URL long and irrelevant. It is preferred to remove these words from URL.

3. Ignoring special characters from URLs

It is always a better practice to ignore special characters from URLs. But there can be few cases where we need these characters. In naukri.com we have some special characters on which people do perform searches so to handle this we convert these character to their English words.

4. Final URL creation

After processing the keywords and location entered for search in above three steps, we put these processed keyword and location strings to create final URL and place specific delimiter between keywords and locations.

5. Use of NOINDEX

Above all points are related to how to make a URL user friendly as well as SEO friendly. But there are some URLs, which are good if not indexed by search engines.

From naukri perspective, suppose we have searched for “Software developer jobs” and there are 500 jobs. As we cannot show all jobs in one page, we have pagination and URL will be “jobsearch.naukri.com/software-developer-jobs-2” which we don’t want search engines to index. So for this we have added noindex tag on the page.

6. Server Side Handling

Now comes the point how these URLs are handled on server side. On server for performing search again we need parameters. So this is how we separate parameters from URLs at server side. We use Rewrite rules at apache level. We match the pattern of URL and substring of the URL is passed to another URL as GET request to corresponding parameters. Some those are:

So in this way, on whatever keyword or location a user performs search on www.naukri.com, we have a unique and both SEO and User Friendly URL for that search result page.

Some Examples :

If you perform search on following keyword and location then following URLs will be created.

Keyword : java                                     Location : Delhi/NCR

URL : http://jobsearch.naukri.com/java-jobs-in-delhi-ncr

Keyword : java and j2ee                       Location : Jammu and Kashmir

URL : http://jobsearch.naukri.com/java-j2ee-jobs-in-jammu-and-kashmir

Keyword : php, mysql,

URL : http://jobsearch.naukri.com/php-mysql-jobs

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