Improving Onsite SEO: Tips from Google - Optimization Details
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Tip#38: “Do not worry about unfriendly URLs (URLs that are not rewritten to contain useful keywords), if your site is stable and has lots of content.”
Some webmaster and website owners are still concerned about their URL structure -- despite the fact that they have already been using the URLs more than a year, and they are indexed by Google and getting traffic out of it.
Note that it takes six months for a permanent (301) redirect to fully mature if you are rewriting a lot of URLs. This huge drop off of traffic can be costly to your business.
So the best advice would be to ignore the unfriendly URLs if you have tons of them indexed by Google. Google says that their system will do its best to understand the URL structure of the website (for example, if you are using dynamically generated URLs).
But do your best also to solve issues such as duplicate content URLs. There are a lot of solutions for duplicate content issues which do not necessarily involve rewriting all of your URLs.
Tip #39 : “Do not optimize the same keywords for the home page and the internal pages. This will introduce canonical issues that can affect rankings.”
A common mistake is that you have a well-defined product page but optimize the home page for the same targeted keywords. The result is that the home page will rank, instead of sending targeted traffic directly to the product pages; the conversion rate in this case will be poor.
Tip #40: “TLD is not that important when it comes to ranking ”
Do not be concerned about your TLD when it comes to general ranking (as opposed to geo-targeted ranking). But country-based TLDs can be important. For example, if you need your website to be associated with Canada, it makes sense to use a .ca domain.
But this is not a strict rule. If you have a website set up to draw in visitors throughout the world, Google will know that and will rank your website in other places, not only in your own country of origin.
Tip #41: “URL Shortener should pass 301 redirect. This is the best application for URL Shortener. ”
URL shortening is becoming more popular along with Twitter and other applications. According to the SEO site review session expert, Matt Cutts, this is nice -- as long as it passes a 301 redirect to the canonical URL.
All of these tips can be downloaded in a check list format for easier implementation.
Google Optimization 
