Effects of different URL slug implementations on search engine rankings?

Question

There are different ways of using URL slugs to specify the location of website content. For example, slugs can be implemented as:

1. Query strings: example.com/some_function?slug=the_url_slug
2. Arguments directly following the domain name: example.com/the_url_slug
3. Arguments following a function and/or controller name: example.com/some_function/the_url_slug

Can somebody explain how much relative weight the top search engines assign to these different ways of using URL slugs?

For example, would the second variant in the list above be ranked more highly than the other two variants? Is the query string URL slug variant even treated as part of the URL by search engines?

Answer 1

A URL is a URL. It can have a query string or not. It can have subdirectories or not. But one format is not better than another as far as SEO goes. Search engines can work with all of them equally as well.

Having said that, having a URL that clearly organizes and identifies the content of that resource is better than one that doesn't. Remember that users use URLs, too, and usability is an important part of SEO. So having a URL that is easy for a user to understand is going to be easy for a search engine to understand. So structure your URLs so they are human friendly and you can't go wrong.