URL Keyword Structure and Importance
-
Hey Guys,
I've done quite a bit of research on this but still can't decide what the correct answer is, so was hoping the Moz community might be able to give some clarification.
Say I have a URL **www.yourdomain.com/product/domain-names **is there any benefit in changing my site's backend structure (a relatively lengthly process) so the URL can read **www.yourdomain.com/domain-names **without the 'product' slug?
I understand keywords in the URL can have a small impact on SEO, but does the positioning to this degree play any part?
Any advice would be great.
Cheers. -
Thanks for clarifying guys; some useful info there
I think I might test with a couple of pages/categories and see what difference it makes. If it's noticeable I will undertake the task of updating all my templates to work without that first slug.
Cheers
-
I have worked on a few sites with issues exactly like this (Drupal, Joomla, custom based CMS), with lengthy periods of time since the changes took effect at the search level. Overall, we did see increases in traffic related to <kw>related organic traffic. My input, is although it's a lengthy process, the benefits outweigh the length of time or complexity to implement.</kw>
Shortening the URL, will increase the <kw>relation to product and brand. It also opens up doors for later expansion if needed, as you want to try to minimize the URL's length. Getting rid of that slug folder will save you character space at later points in site development, if you choose to go another level deep in URL string/folder.</kw>
Devanus is right in most likely losing some related searches to people searching for 'category product name', but in your life an experience, how many times have you actually searched for that yourself? A good thing to do would also run by your analytic's and keyword metrics from organic traffic and determine the potential loss of any traffic related to direct 'category' related product searches.
Just my 2 cents Everyone has different experiences when implementing changes like this, and it may not all be the same across the board.
Good luck. Cheers!
-
Rafi is right. It's recommended to be closer in the url domain. But as the difference will not be huge it's really up to you.
If you have too many changes (coding, indexing, 301, etc.) it may not be justified. Otherwise give it a try it should not be bad !
-
Hi Chris,
Though by dropping, 'product' slug from the URL might not have a great impact (positively) from an SEO standpoint and as the target page is moves a level closer to the root domain by doing so, and this can bring in a little positive effect if not none.
We did something similar in the past and this has been our experience:
We had a URL structure like: example.com/category/product-page
We did an experiment and dropped the category folder. After few weeks, there was a drop in traffic through searches like, 'category product name', but there was very little increase in the traffic that came through product name searches. Overall, we felt that the effort involved did no justify the change it brought in.
Those were my two cents. So its up to you to decide if you really want to go ahead considering the kind of effort involved. Hope our other friends here will add their valuable insights here.
Best,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Keyword stuffing in document
Hi, I recieve a grade A on my on page grader, however i get "Avoid Keyword Stuffing in Document" - now on my page, i am not sure if its avoidable. It says this is highly important, but here is the issue. My website specialises in a particular product, so we have many variations of that product, different fabrics, styles, trimmings etc, so we have over 50 URLS pertaining to different variations of that "keyword" it's not in a spammy way, its actually done as customers are searching for it that way. Let's say for example scarves. Cotton Scarves, Viscose Scarves, Polyester Scarves, Pom Pom Scarves, etc etc So on my homepage even if i reduce the text mentions of "scarves" the urls still have 50 or so with it as the title, and in the URL. So how do i avoid this form of "keyword Stuffing" ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phoenixcg0 -
Keyword location in Permalink structure for custom post types
I am in the process of a large rebuild and redesign of my real estate website. It is Wordpress based with custom post types organized by category archives for neighborhood pages. Through this process, I am expanding my content and number of internal pages by a large amount. I am at a decision point with permalink structure for my site and can choose two different directions to go, not sure which is best or if there is any impact on SEO for the two options. Most of it comes down to location of keyword search terms being placed in my permalink structures. When I first built my site, exact domain match was still a thing for SEO power, and now days I hear it doesn’t hold much weight… so my domain name of http://dwellarizona.com still remains the same either way which does contain an important keyword, but might be redundant if using the keyword “Arizona” elsewhere in a permalink. Is there any difference in SEO power for the following keywords whether they are placed all at the end of the permalink, versus being distributed more throughout the entire link address when there is a hierarchy to the address and some in the domain name, partly in a parent page address, and partly in the child page link address? Target keywords: grayhawk, scottsdale, arizona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shawnbeaird
Option 1: http://dwellarizona.com/luxury/scottsdale/grayhawk vs
Option 2 (parent-child relationship): http://dwellarizona.com/luxury/grayhawk-scottsdale-arizona0 -
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 -
Process for moving existing articles to new structure (URLs, titles, etc)
I am in the midst of a major redesign of my site, including revamping existing articles . I have a couple of hundred articles and I am reviewing all aspects of these articles, including titles, URLs, content, etc. I am putting together a process as I move each article across to the new site and have SEO very much in mind. I'd appreciate any feedback on this. First off, let me be clear that I consider the quality of the content paramount. Anything suggested below is considered "supporting" (that content) from an SEO perspective. But, since I am moving this content across, I may as well take the opportunity to clean things up. The existing articles don't have particularly good SEO-related attributes, in terms of their titles, URLs, use of keywords and so on. So, I plan to do the following for each article. For illustrative purposes (our site serves the wedding industry), I will use an article about how to involve children at a wedding. Questionsunder each bullet. Use the "Keyword Difficulty" feature on Moz Pro to research a specific keyword for each article. In the example case I used "involving children in our wedding". Honestly, I am not really sure what to do with this feature 🙂 I've read everything from "focus on the long tail" to "don't fear highly competitive keywords". So, my current thinking is merely to use it as interesting information for they keyword I choose but not actually make any specific decisions from that ie. make sure the keyword is relevant to the article as the first priority and use the tool to check out search volume. Not sure what I should read into a zero for recent Bing searches. Is that really an important factor? I'm assuming the Google information is not available from Google (it would be displayed here otherwise, I'm guessing) Use a title that uses these keywords. In this case, I simply went with "Involving children in our wedding". Same for URL - /wedding-guests/involving-children-in-our-wedding If I have a reasonable, short and human-friendly term like this (I can do this with virtually every article quite easily), is there any reason why the URL and the title should not be the same? In short, the title and URL are both a relatively concise "mini-sentence" Make sure the meta description of the article is easy-to-read (for humans) and uses the keyword (sentence) Make sure that the theme (we are moving to WordPress) uses H1 for the page header/title and H2 for sections within the document Implement 301 redirects from the old URL (old site) to the new URL This seems like a pretty obvious approach for articles where the URL has changed (which will be most of them). But what do I do with articles that I am going to remove. Should I redirect (301) to a related article (so at least the visitor ends up on a page that is generally relevant) or just let this "fall through" as a non-existent page (401)? As I say, I have 200+ articles to go through I want to make sure I am taking this advantage to clean things up. Anything leaping out as missing/problematic? Thanks in advance Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Keyword stuffing
Hi all. I'm working on this page - http://www.alwayshobbies.com/dolls-houses - for the term 'dolls houses'. It's not doing great at the minute (23rd in GUK) and I was wondering if it might be down to the volume of exact match keywords on the page (32). If not, does anyone have any other pointers? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
How to structure articles on a website.
Hi All, Key to a successful website is quality content - so the Gods of Google tell me. Embrace your audience with quality feature rich articles on your products or services, hints and tips, how to, etc. So you build your article page with all the correct criteria; Long Tail Keyword or phrases hitting the URL, heading, 1st sentance, etc. My question is this
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
Let's say you have 30 articles, where would you place the 30 articles for SEO purposes and user experiences. My thought are:
1] on the home page create a column with a clear heading "Useful articles" and populate the column with links to all 30 articles.
or
2] throughout your website create link references to the articles as part of natural information flow.
or
3] Create a banner or impact logo on the all pages to entice your audience to click and land on dedicated "articles page" Thanks Mark0 -
How important is sticking to an exact keyword?
The latest article I'm writing for my site is "Friends With Benefits Rules"... So the first part of my question is, what does SEOMoz advocate as being the ideal # of times to include the entire key phrase in the article? I know nobody but Google knows for certain, but is 4 (including in H1's etc.) generally considered enough, other than in the page title? Second part is, what is the consensus about how important is it to stick to the exact keyword? For the example I gave, is it just as good to include a comma, E.g. "...friends with benefits, rules..." or a hyphen "Friends with Benefits - Rules for..."? One thing I'm unclear about on this topic is stop words and plurals. I've been told before that Google ignores stop words, but results for searches with or without the word "how," for example produce very different results... Same thing with plurals. In any case, all of the above is assuming that the quality of the content would not be affected in either case...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030 -
Am I keyword stuffing my titles?
I run a site where I answer questions. As I answer each question I choose a title for the page. I have been trying to get good keywords in my titles, but now I am wondering if I have been keyword stuffing them and perhaps I should be more succinct. So, let's say I had a question about a sore back. Here would be the title tag I would use: Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help. | My Main Keyword That's a fictitious example, but the idea is that I would be trying to get the keywords "back", "sore", "spinal", "pain", "relief" "help" and my main website keyword into the title. As I'm writing this I'm seeing the folly in this. I think it would likely be much better to simply have a title of Why is my back sore? So, I have three questions: 1. Is it better to have a succinct title targeting one keyword/keyword phrase than to get lots of keywords in my title? 2. Should I be putting my main keyword after each of my title? Shortly after doing this on 1700+ pages I was #1 for my main keyword. But, I was also doing other things as well to boost my presence for this keyword. 3. If I decide to do more succinct titles, how would you suggest I go about running a test to see which is better? Looking forward to your responses! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0