Similar URLs
-
I'm making a site of LSAT explanations. The content is very meaningful for LSAT students. I'm less sure the urls and headings are meaningful for Google.
I'll give you an example. Here are two URLs and heading for two separate pages:
- http://lsathacks.com/explanations/lsat-69/logical-reasoning-1/q-10/ - LSAT 69, Logical Reasoning I, Q 10
- http://lsathacks.com/explanations/lsat-69/logical-reasoning-2/q10/ - LSAT 69, Logical Reasoning II, Q10
There are two logical reasoning sections on LSAT 69. For the first url is for question 10 from section 1, the second URL is for question 10 from the second LR section.
I noticed that google.com only displays 23 urls when I search "site:http://lsathacks.com". A couple of days ago it displayed over 120 (i.e. the entire site).
1. Am I hurting myself with this structure, even if it makes sense for users?
2. What could I do to avoid it? I'll eventually have thousands of pages of explanations. They'll all be very similar in terms of how I would categorize them to a human, e.g. "LSAT 52, logic games question 12"
I should note that the content of each page is very different. But url, title and h1 is similar.
Edit: I could, for example, add a random keyword to differentiate titles and urls (but not H1). For example:
http://lsathacks.com/explanations/lsat-69/logical-reasoning-2/q10-car-efficiency/
LSAT 69, Logical Reasoning I, Q 10, Car efficiency
But the url is already fairly long as is. Would that be a good idea?
-
This would be normal behavior for a brand new site--things will shuffle around for a good while and yes, even single-character difference in the URLs is enough differentiation.
-
Hope you don't mind me following up again. Search results by past month or year now show nothing, or just one link. If I do a straight site search, I just see four urls.
Is this normal search index behavior at this point, or is there any action I should take? Thanks.
I was also wondering if, based on my current setup, Google will eventually get skilled enough to distinguish results by small differences like "LSAT 68 game 2" vs "LSAT 65 game 2".
-
Those URLs won't inhibit your indexation or your rankings.
-
Thanks! That's a big relief.
Do you think the URL structure is ok as is? Anything I could do to differentiate them for google would, I think, make the site a bit worse for humans.
I do plan to differentiate the title tags more, as soon as I figure out how to make custom h1 tags on Wordpress.
-
Graeme,
Things are just working themselves out as far as indexation. You'll notice that all your pages are showing in the index if you use google's search tools/date feature and search for results from the past month or year:
New sites can take a month or two before showing consistent site:domain searches. BTW, you can leave off the "http://" part of your site:domian search.
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 shows up in "Inurl' but not when using time parameters
Hey everybody, I have been testing the Inurl: feature of Google to try and gauge how long ago Google indexed our page. SO, this brings my question. If we run inurl:https://mysite.com all of our domains show up. If we run inurl:https://mysite.com/specialpage the domain shows up as being indexed If I use the "&as_qdr=y15" string to the URL, https://mysite.com/specialpage does not show up. Does anybody have any experience with this? Also on the same note when I look at how many pages Google has indexed it is about half of the pages we see on our backend/sitemap. Any thoughts would be appreciated. TY!
On-Page Optimization | | HashtagHustler1 -
How important are clean URLs?
Just wanting to understand the importance of clean URLs in regards to SEO effectiveness. Currently, we have URLs for a site that reads as follows: http://www.interhampers.com.au/c/90/Corporate Gift Hampers Should we look into modifying this so that the URL does not have % or figures?
On-Page Optimization | | Gavo1 -
Best practice for URL structure - short and sweet, or double keyword?
We are just about to re-jig our main category pages and have found that different leading sites have taking different views on short and sweet url structure vs. repeated keywords1. For our website we have two options. We have two options: mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants-in-birmingham or mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants Someone like opentable have gone for short and sweet (opentable.co.uk/birmingham-restaurants) whereas people like Time Out have gone longer with multiple matches in the url (timeout.com/london/food-drink/londons-top-50-restaurants). Is there a consensus on which is better?
On-Page Optimization | | HireSpace0 -
Selling Products with a similar meta description
Wondering if anyone can help when selling similar products with very similar meta description and product descriptions in general. Have around 500 products - a lot of products have around 10-20 products which are very similar only different is sizes and a maybe a few lines of text if that. Is this a problem in search engines? How does other ecommerce stores selling similar products solve this problem...
On-Page Optimization | | royRR0 -
Does Google follow link path or url path when it comes to passing link juice
I noticed something with one of my sites and now I am thinking I made a boo boo (I think) here is what I have On my homepage I have 5 links Link1
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich
Link2
Link3
Link4
Link5 Links 1 - 4 go to a page and stops there. So my URL structure is www.mydomain.com/Link1
www.mydomain.com/Link2
www.mydomain.com/Link3
www.mydomain.com/Link4 So naturally my link juice passes down to these links evenly. Link5 also goes to another page, but on that page I have more links that go down further. www.mydomain.com/Link5 -> more links On page Link5 I have links that go to more pages, BUT my URL structure for these pages go like this Lets say on Link5 page I have another link that goes to AnotherLink1, AnotherLink2 and AnotherLink3 When you click on those links it takes you to those pages just fine, BUT my URL structure is like this www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink3 Basically I put all the "AnotherLink1-3" in the root directory as well. My question is concerning how Google passes the link Juice from my pages and if it is passing based on the path of the links and how they point to those pages, or do they pass link juice based on the URL structure. So since "AnotherLink1-3" is located in the root directory am I dividing my link juice from my home page to all the links as well based on the URL structure. For instance www.mydomain.com/Link1
www.mydomain.com/Link2
www.mydomain.com/Link3
www.mydomain.com/Link4
www.mydomain.com/Link5
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink3 Do I need to change my path for Link5 page to www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink3 ?0 -
Removing old URLs from Google
Hello, I am sure that this question has been asked many times, but I am still not sure what to do about the following: Our site's URL structure has changed a few times in the past few months. Recenty, we have changed our URLs to become more SEO friendly. However, Google has indexed the old URLs as well. To give an example: The following page in our website shows the following URLs in Google Webmaster Tools: Confúcio e Seus Ensinamentos
On-Page Optimization | | Tev/artigo/68_38/2/as_religioes_iv_confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos/
/aula/14_6132/vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos/
/aula/1_14_6132/vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos/
/aula/_14_6132/Vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos/
/aula/ensino/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos/ The correct URL is the last one. What should I do about the other ones? Almost all the pages in our website have this problem. We have redirected the old URLs to the new ones, but is there anything else we should do? We were asking Google to remove them, but Google has informed us that it has reached the limit. Please advise us on waht we should do. We have removed the old sitemap with the old URLs. What else must we do? Thank you very much.
0 -
Product sorting and dynamic urls
On our weekly SEOmoz crawls, we get thousands of warnings about overly dynamic URLs as a result of our product sorting options at the top of our category pages. It seems like the ability to sort products by price, name, etc., is nice for the customer. For SEO is this really a problem or can we ignore these warnings?
On-Page Optimization | | teatable0 -
URL question
Hi guys, the pro campaign thing you got going is wicked, love it. I'm recieving good results with my keywords and have noticed that categories that go beyond sub/sub/sub don't do to well. So I wanna move those that do one step up which makes it go from: http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/advanced-routine/scales/aeolian to here http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/advanced-routine/aeolian The existing menu system that follow all these categories across the site will soon go so it won't be a user friendly problem, I will have other type of menus. But, and here is the question: Would I greatly benefit from taking the non existent menu away and just go for: http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/aeolian while i'm at it? Or do I stick with my current structure? I guess my real question is; how much is there to flat URLs? Cheers -dan lundholm spytunes.com
On-Page Optimization | | spytunes0