URL Structure
-
What's the best way to set up a url structure? When a user goes through the funnel should it show it in the url?
Like this:
domain.com/thickness/high-density/1-mil-plastic-bags (1 mil plastic bags is a subcategory - when the user is at this page they will see many products. When they select one - it brings them to a product detail page which I think should be done like this: domain.com/product-name regardless of the funnel that brought them there. Does this make sense?)
or
**domain.com/1-mil-plastic-bags **
Also, is there a limit of how many "/" could be used?
-
Hi Rachel,
There is no reason, rather than just personal preference (to an extent).
I'd like my customers to share a product with their friends on Facebook etc. so I like to get straight to the point in the URL. Maybe having domain.com/department/category/subcategory may be a better option for you, depending on how keyword friendly your categories are.
For example, my DJ company ranks number 1 on Google in the UK for "disco speakers" and this is how I have the URL structured: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/active-powered-pa-speakers/
That is just for a specific type of speaker.
This has worked best for us, but it completely depends on how deep your categories go. We try to make all of our most popular categories as closely linked to the homepage as possible.
Hope this helps!
Tom
-
Thanks Tom for the detailed answer.
Is there a reason why it can only be two forward slashes deep?
-
Rachel,
Wow the upper limit! That depends on the browser. Opera can take 190,000 characters before it chokes. Probably a better question would be, help me find a product/path structure that makes sense to me, and my customer.
Also remember SEO points are awarded by the search engines if the product your trying to optimize for is used in the URL. So if your selling brown paper bags, the using the URL www.mydomaine.com\bags\brown-paper-bags is a better choice than 190,000 hard to read letters or symbols.
-
Hi there,
I currently use Magento Enterprise and this is how we have our URL structure set.
Depending on the software you're using, there is a chance you could have shorter URL's for sharing purposes (e.g. domain.com/category/subcat/product-title-here == domain.com/productcode) but make sure that this URL isn't actually a "page" but is in fact just a redirector. (Unless you want to get involved with "rel canonical" see here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/)
Getting back to your URL structure, this is definitely the way I would recommend anybody set up their URLs. Especially if your domain name doesn't have the keyword in it. E.g. your shop is called LuckyCharms.com and you sell jewellery, a website that is called weselljewellery.com may rank quicker because the keyword is already in the domain name. But with the URL structure set to include the category, the URL now becomes LuckyCharms.com/products/jewellery/bracelets what have you.
The URL is read by search engines and I think it can only be a positive thing to have as much in your URL as you can without making it look messy. Two categories deep is the limit. E.g. domain.com/category/subcategory/product-title-here
Hope this is of some help to you!
Tom
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
-
Why the url inspection is disabled in search console ?
In this situation, how can we make our pages be fetched by google?
On-Page Optimization | | supporthandle0 -
Redirect both / and non-/ URLs?
I am doing SEO on WP site. Due to some duplicate pages (rel canonical was done before) I am doing 301 redirects at the moment. And I wonder if I need to redirect both links w/ and w/o trailing slash. Default is non www, w/o trailing slash. Like there is .com/category/news but there is same page linked in .com/news (well it works when permalink structure is set to /%category%/%postname% and returns 404 error when structure is set to /%postname%).
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ
I redirected .lt/naujienos to .lt/category/naujienos. Should I also redirect .lt/naujienos/ (with trailing slash)? There's absolutely no problem redirecting this, but there are some more pages which I want to edit their URLs and I wonder If I should do both redirects from links /w and w/o slash?1 -
If I put 'keyword/url' combination to 'stop run weekly', will it dissapear from the summary page in the on-page grader?
The summary page of the on-page grader chooses the keyword and url combination itself. Now if I choose another combination, I would like the former to dissapear from the summary page. The only option is 'stop running weekly'. But will it disappear from the list also?
On-Page Optimization | | jongeneelbv0 -
URLs and folder structure for an E-commerce
Hi there !-) I´m helping a friend who has a e-commerce about nail polish in Brazil. I´m a little in doubt about the urls and folder structure. Two questions: 1. There are 10 products per category and 50 categories. Should I put them all in the root folder or creat 2 major categories ( 25 sub-categories each one)? 2. Whats the better product page url ( the store has around 500) nailpolish.com/IMPORT/BRAND/NAME-OF-THE-PRODUCT OR nailpolish.com/COMPLETE-NAME-OF-THE-PRODUCT Whats the best recomandation?
On-Page Optimization | | SeoMartin10 -
How to avoid duplicates when URL and content changes during the course of a day?
I'm currently facing the following challenge: Newspaper industry: the content and title of some (featured) articles change a couple of times during a normal day. The CMS is setup so each article can be found by only using it's specific id (eg. domain.tld/123). A normal article looks like this: domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/i-am-the-topic,123 Now the article gets changed and with it the topic. It looks like this now: domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/i-am-the-new-topic,123 I can not tell the writers that they can not change the article as they wish any more. I could implement canonicals pointing to the short url (domain.tld/123). I could try to change the URL's to something like domain.tld/some-path/sub-path/123. Then we would lose keywords in URL (which afaik is not that important as a ranking factor; rather as a CTR factor). If anyone has experiences sharing them would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jan
On-Page Optimization | | jmueller0 -
Using magentos own url re-writes
We are changing ecommerce platforms. Is it best to use magentos own url re-writes to redirect every page of a site from its old url to it new one?
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0 -
Close URL owned by competitors.
The following example is exactly analogous to our situation (site names slightly altered😞 We own www.business-skills.com. It's our main site. We don't own, and would rather avoid paying for, www.businessskills.com. It's a parked domain and the owners want a very large sum for it. We own www.business-skills.co.uk and point it to our main site. We don't own www.businessskills.co.uk. This is owned by our biggest competitor. We also own www.[ourbrand].com and .co.uk, and point them to the main site. My question is - how much traffic do you think we may be missing due to these nearly-but-not-quite URL matches? Does it matter in terms of lost revenue? What sort of things should I be looking at to get a very rough estimate?
On-Page Optimization | | JacobFunnell0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0