For those who keep a close eye on Google’s ever changing rules you will have noticed a few changes in your display URLs. Firstly there’s the removal of capitalisation from the display URL e.g. www.MrPorter.com will now only display as www.mrporter.com. Whilst this doesn’t seem like a big change it may affect those with a particular long URL. What was once just about legible as www.FourPointsSheikhZayedRoad.com now looks like www.fourpointssheikhzayedroad.com – not as easy.

Google’s reasoning behind this latest change is to have some synergy between Natural and Paid and they’ve actual quoted an increase in overall CTR – something which I’m not 100% convinced about. Personally, the only reason I can see Google doing this is to again blur the line between paid and natural ads which come in lower case as standard but it does bring up a few of points to bear in mind when creating ad copy

1. Even before you create a site is your URL easy to read and understand?

2. To bring back the evergreen joke, are you prepared to have www.Therapist.com be displayed as www.therapist.com? – think about how the use may interpret your URL

2. Has CTR decreased? Keep a close eye on this and make changes to the text after the domain name. Lower case letters only apply to sub domains and domains. e.g. you can still use www.fourpoints.com/SheikhZayedRoad or www.fourpoints.com/Sheikh-Zayed-Road if need be

Bearing the above in mind, the next change or test seen in Google is even more confusing. Recently people have seen spaces being used in display URLs.

Essentially what this does is add in spaces to separate out words based on the search term. So theatrebreaks.hoteldirect.co.uk now becomes theatre breaks.hoteldirect.co.uk if theatre breaks is searched for. Not only does this negate the previous change which Google have made but it also alters the brand being built up e.g. lastminute.com is trademarked as lastminute.com not last minute.com. Although this new change may help increase CTRs by making URLs clearer to read it does beg the question why change it in the first place! The above is still very much in beta and will be hard to spot but something to look out for.

CS