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 & Best Practice when Facing 4+ Sub-levels
Hi. I've spent the last day fiddling with the setup of a new URL structure for a site, and I can't "pull the trigger" on it. Example: - domain.com/games/type-of-game/provider-name/name-of-game/ Specific example: - arcade.com/games/pinball/deckerballs/starshooter2k/ The example is a good description of the content that I have to organize. The aim is to a) define url structure, b) facilitate good ux, **c) **create a good starting point for content marketing and SEO, avoiding multiple / stuffing keywords in urls'. The problem? Not all providers have the same type of game. Meaning, that once I get past the /type-of-game/, I must write a new category / page / content for /provider-name/. No matter how I switch the different "sub-levels" around in the url, at one point, the provider-name doesn't fit as its in need of new content, multiple times. The solution? I can skip "provider-name". The caveat though is that I lose out on ranking for provider keywords as I don't have a cornerstone content page for them. Question: Using the URL structure as outlined above in WordPress, would you A) go with "Pages", or B) use "Posts"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan-Louis0 -
Replace dynamic paramenter URLs with static Landing Page URL - faceted navigation
Hi there, got a quick question regarding faceted navigation. If a specific filter (facet) seems to be quite popular for visitors. Does it make sense to replace a dynamic URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants.html?a_type=239 by a static, more SEO friendly URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants/levis-pants.html by creating a proper landing page for it. I know, that it is nearly impossible to replace all variations of this parameter URLs by static ones but does it generally make sense to do this for the most popular facets choose by visitors. Or does this cause any issues? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennovators0 -
New blog post URLs due to WordPress permalink structure changes. Any SEO repercussions?
A client site had the follwing URLs for all blog posts: www.example.com/health-news/sample-post www.example.com/health-news is the top level page for the blog section. While making some theme changes during Google mobilegeddon, the permalink structure got changed to www.example.com/sample-post ("health-news" got dropped from all blog post URLs). Google has indexed the updated post structure and older URLs are getting redirected (if entered directly in the browser) to the new ones; it appears that WordPress takes care of that automatically as no 301 redirects were entered manually. It seems that there hasn't been any loss of rankings (however not 100% sure as the site ranks for well over 100 terms). Do you suggest changing the structure back to the old one? Two reasons that I see are preserving any link juice from domains linking to old URLs and ensuring no future/current loss of rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VishalRayMalik0 -
Complex URL Migration
Hi There, I have three separate questions which are all related. Some brief back ground. My client has an adventure tourism company that takes predominantly North American customers on adventure tours to three separate destinations: New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. They previously had these sites on their own URL's. These URL's had the destination in the URL (eg: sitenewzealand.com). 2 of the three URL's had good age and lots of incoming links. This time last year a new web company was bought in and convinced them to pull all three sites onto a single domain and to put the sites under sub folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand). The built a brand new site for them on a Joomla platform. Unfortunately the new sites have not performed and halved the previous call to action rates. Organic traffic was not adversely affected with this change, however it hasn't grown either. I have been overhauling these new sites with a project team and we have managed to keep the new design but make usability/marketing changes that have the conversion rate nearly back to where it originally was and we have managed to keep the new design (and the CMS) in place. We have recently made programmatic changes to the joomla system to push the separate destination sites back onto their original URL's. My first question is around whether technically this was a good idea. Question 1 Does our logic below add up or is it flawed logic? The reasons we decided to migrate the sites back onto their old URL's were: We have assumed that with the majority of searches containing the actual destination (eg: "New Zealand") that all other things being equal it is likely to attract a higher click through rate on the domain www.sitenewzealand.com than for www.site.com/new-zealand. Having the "newzealand" in the actual URL would provide a rankings boost for target keyword phrases containing "new zealand" in them. We also wanted to create the consumer perception that we are specialists in each of the destinations which we service rather than having a single site which positions us as a "multi-destination" global travel company. Two of the old sites had solid incoming links and there has been very little new links acquired for the domain used for the past 12 months. It was also assumed that with the sites on their own domains that the theme for each site would be completely destination specific rather than having the single site with multiple destinations on it diluting this destination theme relevance. It is assumed that this would also help us to rank better for the destination specific search phrases (which account for 95% of all target keyword phrases). The downsides of this approach were that we were splitting out content onto three sites instead of one with a presumed associated drop in authority overall. The other major one was the actual disruption that a relatively complex domain migration could cause. Opinions on the logic we adopted for deciding to split these domains out would be highly appreciated. Question 2 We migrated the folder based destination specific sites back onto their old domains at the start of March. We were careful to thoroughly prepare the htaccess file to ensure we covered off all the new redirects needed and to directly redirect the old redirects to the new pages. The structure of each site and the content remained the same across the destination specific folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand/hiking became sitenewzealand.com/hiking). To achieve this splitting out of sites and the ability to keep the single instance of Joomla we wrote custom code to dynamically rewrite the URL's. This worked as designed. Unfortunately however, Joomla had a component which was dynamically creating the google site maps and as this had not had any code changes it got all confused and started feeding up a heap of URL's which never previously existed. This resulted in each site having 1000 - 2000 404's. It took us three weeks to work this out and to put a fix into place. This has now been done and we are down to zero 404's for each site in GWT and we have proper google site maps submitted (all done 3 days ago). In the meantime our organic rankings and traffic began to decline after around 5 days (after the migration) and after 10 days had dropped down to around 300 daily visitors from around 700 daily visitors. It has remained at that level for the past 2 weeks with no sign of any recovery. Now that we have fixed the 404's and have accurate site maps into google, how long do you think it will take to start to see an upwards trend again and how long it is likely to take to get to similar levels of organic traffic compared to pre-migration levels? (if at all). Question 3 The owner of the company is understandably nervous about the overall situation. He is wishing right now that we had never made the migration. If we decided to roll back to what we previously had are we likely to cause further recovery delays and would it come back to what we previously had in a reasonably quick time frame? A huge thanks to everyone for reading what is quite a technical and lengthy post and a big thank you in advance for any answers. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activenz
Conrad0 -
Best strategy for duplicate content?
Hi everyone, We have a site where all product pages have more or less similar text (same printing techniques, etc.) The main differences are prices and images, text is highly similar. We have around 150 products in every language. Moz's algorithm tells me to do something about duplicate content, but I don't really know what we could do, since the descriptions can't be changed to be very different. We essentially have paper bags in different colors and and from different materials.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaanMSonberg0 -
Received "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site:" but most of the example URLs are noindexed.
An example URL can be found here: http://symptom.healthline.com/symptomsearch?addterm=Neck%20pain&addterm=Face&addterm=Fatigue&addterm=Shortness%20Of%20Breath A couple of questions: Why is Google reporting an issue with these URLs if they are marked as noindex? What is the best way to fix the issue? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Overly-Dynamic URL
Hi, We have over 5000 pages showing under Overly-Dynamic URL error Our ecommerce site uses Ajax and we have several different filters like, Size, Color, Brand and we therefor have many different urls like, http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Pumps.html?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all http://www.dellamoda.com/designer-handbags.html?use_selected_filter=Y&option=manufacturer%3A&page3 Could we use the robots.txt file to disallow these from showing as duplicate content? and do we need to put the whole url in there? like: Disallow: /*?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y if not how far into the url should be disallowed? So far we have added the following to our robots,txt Disallow: /?sort=title Disallow: /?use_selected_filter=Y Disallow: /?sort=price Disallow: /?clearall=Y Just not sure if they are correct. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,Kami
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dellamoda2 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist scude@sierratradingpost.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0