Wordpress Woocomerce Recommended SEO URL structure
-
Hi Mozzers !
Thanks for looking.
I have a new shop in development (http://www.vintageheirloom.biz), I'm now using WordPress & Woocommerce.
I've asked Woocommerce whether it is possible to remove the 'shop' and 'product-category' categories. They say it is, but it isn't recommended, it can slow site speed & create possible duplicate pages.
I'm wondering what seasoned SEO experts opinions are on my particular structure? I've heard that a flat structure is recommended, but ecommerce shops as I understand pose their own issues, so any feedback would be appreciated.. Here's some URL examples:
http://vintageheirloom.biz/shop/bags/ - this for the category bags
http://vintageheirloom.biz/product-category/bags/shoulder-bags/ - this for shoulder bags a child of bags category
http://vintageheirloom.biz/shop/2-55-bags/vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-2-55-bag/ - a product
The last URL contains the category 2-55 bags. The products name also includes the phrases 2-55 bag. Should this level of repetition be avoided or is it best to keep the whole phrase 'vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-2-55-bag/' for SEO purposes?
Thanks for any help you can give me around this issue!
Kevin
-
Glad it was helpful!
If you are going to have a true blog then that is enough in order to segment it out. Having the date in there can be helpful to compare the hits you are getting to old blogs vs newer blogs (i.e. how long your content is staying relevant).
If you are going to have other types of content such as shopping guides / product comparisons / etc that are more "timeless" pieces of content then you might want to think about the kinds of articles you are going to write and create prefixes that match those types of articles.
You could definitely do product guides and product comparisons in a blog but it can be harder to segment out if it is just "blog".
Hope that helps. Cheers!
-
Joshua,
Many thanks, that really is helpful.
When you mention a prefix for the blog, would simply adding blog be ok?
http://vintageheirloom.biz/blog/2013/08/vintage-heirloom-turns-4/
Thanks for the links I'm off to have a look !
Cheers !
-
Thanks Jon,
We get vintage bags, mostly unique but not always, e.g. we get several vintage Celine box bags over the year, so we do get duplicate titles and do need to add a serial number.
Biz is my dev area, but thanks for the info !
-
One thing to keep in mind with the urls is how you can segment them in analytics for easy data analysis. You want them to be semantic and pretty but also easily segmented. I would encourage you to think about how you will be able to segment your urls in analytics so that you can easily see patterns in how people are browsing the site and what types of pages are successful.
For instance we have the following url structures for brands, equipment, replacement parts, and a learning center.
- brand/[brand-name]
- equipment/type/[category] - for the categorization of equipment
- equipment/brand/[product] - for easy segmentation of products
- part/type/[category]
- part/brand/[part]
- learn/[cat]
- learn/article/[article-title]
This gives us a lot of flexibility in moving products around in the menu system without messing up urls while still being semantic, and allowing for easy segmentation in analytics. For instance, with this setup we can see if people prefer navigating by equipment catalog or by brand. It also allows us to easily pull out the learning center articles and all the visit we get to them to see how eCommerce only visits are doing.
One thing I would suggest with your blog is to have some kind of prefix that allows you to easily exclude those pages (or only include those pages) in analytics. If you simply go by year without a prefix it will be harder to segment out the data.
You should check out a mozinar that Moz did with Everett Sizemore that deals with a lot of these issues (he specifically talks about SEO and url structure).
Also, you probably have already seen this, but yoast's plugin for wordpress will allow you to remedy much of the duplicate content that wordpress can create.
Cheers!
-
You should ideally be able to write unique titles for every product and post without the need for serial numbers or dates to prevent duplication. But it won't do any harm to have the date in your post URLs if you want to.
I'd look at whether you can get a different domain to .biz as they aren't considered as trustworthy by web users.
-
Thanks for this Jon,
I tweaked the perma links and now have this for a product:
http://vintageheirloom.biz/shop/vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-2-55-bag/
It's a bit closer to the so named 'flat structure' and I think the URL still contains the reference that it is a 2.55 bag, hopefully this works. I'll get around duplications by adding a serial number or unique database number at the end.
We are blogging too so it might be worth keeping these categories, could avoid potential issues down the road.
I did notice I have a very flat structure for our blogs e.g.
http://vintageheirloom.biz/vintage-bamboo-gucci-bags/
This looks like it could lead to duplicates, so I've changed it to:
http://vintageheirloom.biz/2013/07/vintage-bamboo-gucci-bags/
Would you agree this is better?
Thanks
-
What you have looks fine to me, I don't think there will be an issue with repeating 2-55 bags in the product title as it would be useful for differentiating that bag from another bag of the same name that isn't a 2-55, eg vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-bag.
You could definitely remove the /shop/ or /product-category/ if your site is a shop and nothing else. If you have a blog, and want a 'bags' category then keeping /product-category/ might be preferable to avoid confusion and potential duplication.
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
-
Changing URL structure of site, including AMP - redirect AMP too?
So, I'm changing all the URLs of a site, including all its AMP URLs, I'll be redirecting all the normal URLs, but do I need to also redirect all the AMP pages?
Technical SEO | | alksfjasldfu934341 -
No structured sitemap
Hello We face this problem that a lot of sitemaps are structurally not good. In this case we used the WP sitemap plugin to generate the website sitemap and Google XML sitemaps to generate the sitemap for Google. We also bought the Yoast premium plugin, but we can read in the backend that the plugin XML sitemaps may cause problems in combination with Yoast. Normally the Google XML sitemap generator improves SEO using sitemaps for the best indexation by search engines, but the structure is not as we want it. Will Yoast be a better solution to generate structured sitemaps? This is a section from the current sitemap of www.rovana.be. Products Reepgordijn Plissé - Dupli gordijn Duo rolgordijn Paneelgordijn Jaloezie - Vlinderjaloezie Poorten Muggenramen Velux accessoires Rolgordijn Vouwgordijn Buitenjaloezie Voorzetrolluik Glasdak Glaswand Vouwdak Pergola Verlichting - Verwarming Automatisering Lamellendak Verandazonwering Screens Koepel zonwering This is how we think the sitemap should look like. We would like more structure in the different product categories. Producten Zonwering Zonnescherm
Technical SEO | | conversal
Screens
Verandazonwering
Koepel zonwering
Automatisering
Verwarming – verlichting Terrasoverkapping Lamellendak
Pergola
VouwdaK
Glasdak
Glaswand Raamdecoratie Rolgorijn
Paneelgordijn
Duo rolgordijn
Vouwgordijn
Plissé – dupli gordijn
Jaloezie – vlinderjaloezie
Reepgordijn
Velux accessoires Rolluiken Voorzetrolluiken
Buitenjaloezie
Velux accessoires Muggenramen Muggenraam
Velux accessoires Poorten Sectionaal poort Is this technically possible to create similar sitemaps in WordPress and how exactly do we proceed here? What is the impact of these changes on SEO? How can we make this work? Thanks!0 -
Menu impact on SEO
we have a single page web application for an ecommerce website. I think it is built in angular. One UX features we are exploring is the use of a "Products" Item on the menu with the categories showing on a menu rather than directly present on the header. The aim being to keep the header nice and clean. The result of this is that the categories which would typically sit in the header will now not be immediately visible until the menu is opened. Let's say I want to rank well for "building materials". Traditionally the view would be that this word would need to be in the header and marked up with the appropriate h tag. Will moving "building materials" into a product menu be detrimental for SEO? My initial thought is that as long as it is coded correctly there shouldn't be any impact on SEO. Can anyone give me their expert SEO view?
Technical SEO | | built_bot0 -
Proper way of handling wordpress urls and redirects?
I have recently changed some of my urls in wordpress + adding a sub category in the url structure. from
Technical SEO | | Livet
www.mydomain.se/category/subcategory to www.mydomain.se/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ My products are stil under www.mydomain.se/products/cool-product and are not affected. Should I 301 the old url (www.mydomain.se/category/subcategory) to the new (www.mydomain.se/category/subcategory/subcategory2/)? If that is so, can someone recommend a good 301 redirection plugin? Thanks!0 -
Wordpress Archive pages
In the SEOMOZ site report a number of errors were found. One of which was no or duplicate meta desctions on certain blog pages. When I drilled down to find these i noticed thosepages are the wordpress autocreated archive pages. When I searched for these through the wordpress control panel through both pages and blogs they were nowhere to be found. Does anyone know how to find these pages or are they not something I need to worry about?
Technical SEO | | laserclinics0 -
Long URL
I am using seomoz software as a trial, it has crawled my site and a report is telling me that the URL for my forum is to long: <dl> <dt>Title</dt> <dd>Healthy Living Community</dd> <dt>Meta Description</dt> <dd>Healthy life discussion forum chatting about all aspects of healthy living including nutrition, fitness, motivation and much more.</dd> <dt>Meta Robots</dt> <dd>noodp, noydir</dd> <dt>Meta Refresh</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dd> 1 Warning Long URL (> 115 characters) Found about 17 hours ago <dl> <dt>Number of characters</dt> <dd>135 (over by 21)</dd> <dt>Description</dt> <dd>A good URL is descriptive and concise. Although not a high priority, we recommend a URL that is shorter than 75 characters.</dd> </dl> </dd> <dd> URL: http://www.goodhealthword.com/forum/reprogramming-health/welcome-to-the-forum-for-discussing-the-4-steps-for-reprogramming-ones-health/ The problem is when I check the page via edit or in the admin section of wordpress, the url is a s follows: http://www.goodhealthword.com/forum/ My question is where is I cannot see where this long url is located, it appears to be a valid page but I cant find it. Thanks Pete </dd> </dl>
Technical SEO | | petemarko0 -
Subdomains & SEO
Exact match domains are great for ranking but what about domains which contain just half of the full phrase being targeted? eg. If you owned the domain rentals.co.uk but wanted to target the search term "car rentals" Regarding backlinks, would it be best to link back to your rentals.co.uk homepage (using anchor text "car rentals") or to one of the following: a) www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals b) car.rentals.co.uk AND 301 redirect to www.rentals.co.uk c) car.rentals.co.uk AND 301 redirect to www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals
Technical SEO | | martyc1