Crazy long weird URLs... help
-
I have a HTML website, mysite1.com, and I placed a link on the home page to another one of my sites, mysite2.com
Today I checked the links to mysite2.com in Majestic and noticed 24 links coming from the mysite1.com instead of just one link.
The URLs from mysite1.com that are showing in Majestic are like this
mysite1.com,was inherited from a friend and I believe that it was originally built in Frontpage.
Can you tell me how I can get rid of these multiple links as I only want 1 showing from the home page
Thanks in advance
-
I would need to see this to give you any real feedback on it John but general rule of thumb is if Google looked at these links, would they see and understand the reasoning for the links to be there?
Andy
-
I see what you mean. Well the links from the home page sites are going from sites that are for information purposes only, then link to the service provider recommended by that website.
I wouldn't see anything wrong with this. There are 5 sites linking from the home page to my main site out of 120 backlinks. I presume that this doesnt look bad in Google's eyes
-
I can't really help you with the htaccess stuff John, but regarding links from the homepage to another external site, this has always been a questionable practice. Why would you want to direct someone to another site as soon as they got to your homepage? Google see this in a similar way.
However, if there is a very good reason for the link to appear there and if it formed part of a good sentence with accurate anchor text and wasn't trying to push people there just to get traffic up, then I can see no harm - bit hard to judge without seeing though.
Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Thanks for helping out.
Can you tell me why you think home page links are bad? I actually started a question about this last week but didnt get many replys. Do you think getting home page links a bad thing to do?
Ive done some digging and found that when I go to mysite1.com in majestic and look at Pages, its showing all the long URLs that I found pointing to mysite2.com
So I guess that at some point in its life, these pages have been indexed by Google.
These URLs all start with a ? i.e. mysite1.com/?561796
So I am guessing the best way to solve this is to make all URLs that start with a /? be redirected to the root.
Unfortunetly I have no idea how to write this in the htaccess file
-
First of all, be careful with off-site links from your homepage unless there is a very good reason for it. If there isn't, I would always no-follow it so Google doesn't see an unethical link.
With reagards what you are seeing in Majestic, when you hover over the link, what do you see? Is it just a normal HTML link or has it been completed another way?
Andy
-
Ok I have noticed that any URL with ? at the end shows the home page.
mysite1.com/? will show the home page
mysite1.com/?111 will show the home page
etc etc
So I guess I need to redirect anything with a ? to the home page using a 301.
Can someone tell me what the code will be to do that in the htaccess file?
-
Hi John
PM me if you like, I'll have a look for you. Promise not to repeat the domain name.
-
Hi,
Unfortunately I cant do that on a public forum.
But I can tell you all the URLs look like the one Ive posted, loads of numbers etc.
It isnt a dynamic site so these actual URLs are not live pages.
When you visit these URLs, they are just duplicates of the home page
Hope that helps a little
-
Hi John
Could you provide the address so we can look please. Would be making wild guesses else.
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 with dash or slash
Hi, everyone Basically I am editing my website page's URL for SEO Optimisation and I am not sure which URL structure is best for SEO. The main different is the sign ( dash or slash ) before the product-code. HERE ARE TWO EXAMPLE www.example.com/long-tail-keyword-product-code www.example.com/long-tail-keyword/product-code To get more idea of my page, here is one of the product from my website : http://www.okeus.co.uk/pro_view-3.html My website is selling my own product, as a result the only keyword can be found was the name of the product and I separated different design by different code. Any experts who are willing help would be very much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisyu781 -
URL Optimisation Dilemma
First of all, I fully appreciate that I may be over analysing this, so feel free to highlight if you think I’m going overboard on this one. I’m currently trying to optimise the URLs for a group of new pages that we have recently launched. I would usually err on the side of leaving the urls as they are so that any incoming links are not diluted through the 301 re-direct. In this case, however, there are very few links to these pages, so I don’t think that changing URLs will harm them. My main question is between short URLs vs. long URLs (I have already read Dr. Pete’s post on this). Note: the URLs I have listed below are not the actual URLs, but very similar examples that I have created. The URLs currently exist in a similar format to the examples below: http://www.company.com/products/dlm/hire-ca My first response was that we could put a few descriptive keywords in the url, with something like the following: http://www.company/products/debt-lifecycle-management/hire-collection-agents - I’m worried though that the URL will get too long for any pages sitting under this. As a compromise, I am considering the following: http://www.company/products/dlm/hire-collection-agents My feeling is that the second approach will give the best balance between having the keywords for the products and trying to ensure good user experience. My only concern is whether the /dlm/ category page would suffer slightly, but this would have ‘debt-lifecycle-management’ in the title tag. Does this sound like a good approach to people? Or do you think I’m being a little obsessive about this? Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
URL Structure
URL i have to use targeted keyword on all sub page domain or not for example now i am using url like this format fundingtype.html litigation-funding.html legal-funding.html financingservices.html process.html and if i re-write all url with targated keyword like this format lawsuit-loans-fundingtype.html lawsuit-loans-litigation-funding.html lawsuit-loans-legal-funding.html lawsuit-loans-financingservices.html lawsuit-loans-process.html so which type URL are more effective for best SEO ??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JulieWhite0 -
URL - Keywords
My domain name contains my top two keywords. Am I penalized if I create another page where I add my domain key words a 2nd time after the domain name along with a subcategory and the name of a state. I don't know what white hat and black hat is so I want to make sure I stay white hat. Also I didn't know it but is it true that your title shows up in your domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Changing Site URLs
I am working on a new client that hasn't implemented any SEO previously. The site has terrible url nomenclature and I am wondering if it is worth it to try and change it. Will I lose rankings? What is the best url naming structure? Here's the website http://www.formica.com/en/home/TradeLanding.aspx. (I am only working on the North America site.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Rewriting dynamic urls to static
We're currently working on an SEO project for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. After a crawl of their site, tons of duplicate content issues came up. We think this is largely down to the use of their brand filtering system, which works like this: By clicking on a brand, the site generates a url with the brand keywords in, for example: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html filtered by the brand Mammut becomes: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html?filter_brand=48 This was done by a previous SEO agency in order to prevent duplicate content. We suspect that this has made the issue worse though, as by removing the dynamic string from the end of the URL, the same content is displayed as the unfiltered page. For example http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html shows the same content as: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html Now, if we're right in thinking that Google is unlikely to the crawl the dynamic filter, this would seem to be the root of the duplicate issue. If this is the case, would rewriting the dynamic URLs to static on the server side be the best fix? It's a Windows Server/asp site. I hope that's clear! It's a pretty tricky issue and it would be good to know your thoughts. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Page URL Issue
Hey Friend, I am having sort of a problem. I currently have a subpage with the url of: /musclecars/ I also have a subpage at /muscle-cars/muscle-car-restoration.html Obviously my main url is not listed here. My problem is I am trying to rank for the term Muscle Cars but the first URL does not have the keywords seperated so I rank no where. If I type MuscleCars into google I rank though (but nobody types the keyword in like that). So my question is can I create muscle-cars.mydomainname.com and rank well with that? Or is it better to just use mydomainname.com/muscle-cars/ even though that second term I am ranking for already has that in its url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shandaman0