New URL : Which is best
-
Which is best:
www.domainname.com/category-subcategory
or
www.domainname.com/subcategory-category
or
www.domainname.com/category/subcategory
or
www.domain.com/subcategory/category
I am going to have 12 different subcategories under the category
-
I'm biased towards a flattened architecture with fewer directories. I think it can help with click-through and makes more sense from an organizational point of view.
To be fair, with the exception of #4, I've seen real-world examples of all of these that rank and perform very well.
If this were a vote, I'd vote for #2. Consider how Yelp organizes their URLs using the following example listing for a dentist in Seattle.
http://www.yelp.com/biz/randall-broom-dds-seattle
The above example is actually a hybrid, because the /biz directory is actually a category, but so is "seattle" which is appended to the end of the URL.
Whatever you choose, make sure it's consistent and follow a logical navigation and linking structure, so that both search engines and users understand where they are at all times.
-
I don't think I have had any problems with my pages getting crawled. I only have about 500.
I was thinking more along the lines of Click-ability and if it had any bearing on the google rankings.
-
www.domainname.com/category/subcategory
ALL THE WAY! You want to be crawled from the top down.
-
I've always had better luck and an easier time ranking with less trailing slashes.
-
Really?
I'd have gone for www.domainname.com/category/subcategory
Have you done any testing on this? Would be really interested in hearing your results.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL structure for new product launch
Hello, I work for a company (let's call it companyX) that is about to launch a new product, lets call it ProductY. www.CompanyX.com is an old domain with a good domain authority. The market in which ProductY is being launched is extremely competitive. The marketing department want's to launch ProductY on a new website at www.ProductY.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lvet
My opinion is that we should instead create a subfolder with product information at www.CompanyX.com/ProductY. By doing this we could leverage on the existing domain authority of CompanyX.com Additionally for campaigns, and in order to have a more memorable URL we could use ProductY.com with a 301 redirect to www.CompanyX.com/ProductY What do you think is the best strategy from an SEO point of view? Cheers
Luca0 -
URL Change Best Practice
I'm changing the url of some old pages to see if I can't get a little more organic out of them. After changing the url, and maybe title/desc tags as well, I plan to have Google fetch them. How does Google know that the old url is 301'd to the new url and the new url is not just a page of duplicate content? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Microsite Subfolder URL vs Redirected TLD for best SEO
We have a healthcare microsite that is in a subfolder off a hospital site.They wanted to keep their TLD and redirect from the subfolder URL. Even with good on-page SEO, link building, etc., they're not organically ranking as well as we think they should be. ie. They have http://our-business-name.com vs. http://hospital.org/our-business-name/ For best SEO value, are they better off having only their homepage as TLD and not redirect any interior pages but display as subfolder URL? ie. Keep homepage as http://our-business-name.com but use hospital urls for interior pages http://hospital.org/our-business-name/about/ Or is there some better way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IT-dmd0 -
Is it best to have products and reviews on the same URL?
Hi Moz, Is it better to have products and reviews on the same or different URLs? I suspect that combining these into one page will help with rankings overall even though some ranking for product review terms may suffer. This is for a hair products company with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of reviews. Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
How to best handle expired content?
Similar to the eBay situation with "expired" content, what is the best way to approach this? Here are a few examples. With an e-commerce site, for a seasonal category of "Christmas" .. what's the best way to handle this category page after it's no longer valid? 404? 301? leave it as-is and date it by year? Another example. If I have an RSS feed of videos from a big provider, say Vevo, what happens when Vevo tells me to "expire" a video that it's no longer available? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB0 -
Launching 20 new URLs to branch out from a multi brand website. How do I make sure the rankings stay?
I have a client with a multiple brand website currently. The site has landing pages and directories for each of its 20 brands under one URL. The plan is to build 20 separate brand websites with new domains and have the old content redirect to its corresponding new URL. The problem that I envision is being able to successfully carry all of the existing indexed content over while only using 301 redirects and submitting the new domains to Webmaster tools. Has anyone done this in the past successfully and do you have any recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Empower_MediaMarketing0 -
Does URL format affect Keyword effectiveness for a URL?
I am looking at our site structure, and don't want to have to rebuild the way the site was linked together based on it's current folder structure so I am wondering what option would work better for our URL structure. I will uses car categories as an example of what I am talking about, but you can insert any category structure you like. For example I would like to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford-convertibles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SL_SEM
www.example.com/chevy-convertibles But instead due to the site structure I will need to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford/convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/convertibles But wonder if I shouldn't do the following to ensure the proper phrase is known for the page: www.example.com/ford/ford-convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/chevy-convertibles The "/ford/ford-convertibles" just seems odd to me as a human, but I haven't seen anything on how well a keyphrase in a URL split by /'s does and I know dashes for phrases are fine. This means I am inclined to go with the"/ford/ford-convertibles"style because it keeps the keyphrase separated by dashes even if it is a bit repetitive. There will be other pages too like "/ford/top-10-fords-ever" but I don't wonder about that since it isnt "ford/ford-xxxxx" Thoughts on whether /'s in a keyphrase are as good as dashes?0 -
Googlebot crawling partial URLs
Hi guys, I've checked my email this morning and I've got a number of 404 errors over the weekend where Google has tried to crawl some of my existing pages but not found the full URL. Instead of hitting 'domain.com/folder/complete-pagename.php' it's hit 'domain.com/folder/comp'. This is definitely Googlebot/2.1; http://www.google.com/bot.html (66.249.72.53) but I can't find where it would have found only the partial URL. It certainly wasn't on the domain it's crawling and I can't find any links from external sites pointing to us with the incorrect URL. GoogleBot is doing the same thing across a single domain but in different sub-folders. Having checked Webmaster Tools there aren't any hard 404s and the soft ones aren't related and haven't occured since August. I'm really confused as to how this is happening.. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | panini0