Changing URL Structure From Flat to Pyramid Theme
-
Hello Mozzers,
I have an on-page SEO question regarding URL structure. A few months back we hired a full-time SEO person who is working on-page right now and she really wants us to completely re-due our URL restructure from a flat to pyramid style (example below).
Current URL structure / page title is:
Dog training Collars - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/Small Dog training Collars - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/small-dog-training-collars/Einstein ET-300TS Mini Dog Training Collar - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/einstein-et-300ts-mini-remote-dog-trainer.htmlSuggested URL structure / page title change:
Quality Dog Training Collars - Lowest Price Guarantee - K9electronics
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/Dog Training Collars - Small Dog - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/small-dog/Einstein ET-300TS Mini - Dog Training Collars - K9electronics.com
http://www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/small-dog/einstein-et-300ts-miniI guess you could say we are the poster-boys for Google penalties and have received just about every penalty in the book. Panda, penguin algo penalties and a partial manual action for unnatural links. Several months ago we removed 1000's of in-bound links and had our manual action lifted a few months back and are now hovering around the top / mid 2nd page for all our big terms ...we used to be top 3 for everything.
As we were removing bad links, we also completely redesigned the site and removed lots of categories and products and 95% of all our old, low quality content and replaced it with new, high quality content. The site was really slooooow, so we optimized it and moved it to a big dedicated server and tripled page load time. Added rich snippets, Google authorship, increased our FB and other social presences and much more ...
I had also considered this URL structure change during the redesign because I had heard and read that it was good to do, but it required redirecting practically all our URL's which I know can hurt the site even more so then it already has been ...
Our SEO says that as it sits now, our pages are competing with each other and really seems to think this is going to improve our rankings a lot ...after several weeks. My question is, at this stage in the game, is it really going to help a lot and give us more benefit compared to the 301 redirect link juice loss? Any comments and/or suggestions are very much appreciated!
-
I can see what your SEO person is saying, in creating a themed silo site structure. However, you can do this with virtual structural changes vs. UI changes. Also, if you are battling to get back on top less changes to what Google has already spidered the better. And I agree with Claudio as well, don't make it harder for Google to do their job.
Review your content to review cross linking abnormalities as well as missed opportunities in 'theming' your site structure and content.
Answer the question: Does this link from page a <-> page b useful to the reader / shopper and subsequently, the search engine.
-
Hi Byron
At a first glance at least, I would not agree with your new SEO. I definitely prefer your actual flat pyramid url scheme than this new high piramid url proposed.
Google will never read those deep new urls!
Maybe I would try to change your actual ones, but never hiding them three leves deep beneath earth...After undergoing such penalties I personally would not be so much afraid on making huge changes, and I would take the "risk" of changing them but do not hiding them!
Hope it helps to build a panorama.
Good luck
Cheers from a sunny winter in Spain
Claudio
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
-
Anyone know the benefit of URLs being in the target language?
For example, a page targeting the spanish language, does it make a difference if the URL is site.com/i-don't-speak-spanish vs site.com/no-habla-espanol
On-Page Optimization | | LennyO0 -
To update or not to update news URLs ?
We manage a huge daily news website in my small country - keeping this a bit mysterious in case competitors are reading 🙂 Our URL structure is www.companyname.com/news/categoryofnews/title-of-article?id=articleid In this hyperreactive news world, title of articles change frequently (may be ten times a day for the main stories). The question we debate is : should we reflect the modification of the title in the URL or not ? Example : "Trump says he wants to ban search engines" would have URL http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-says-he-wants-to-ban-search-engines?id=12345678 Later in the day the title becomes "Trump denies he suggested banning search engines". Should the URL be modified to http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-denies-he-suggested-banning-search-engines?id=12345678 (option A) or not (option B) ? In Google News it makes no difference because of the sitemap, but in Google organic things are different. At present (option B in place), Google apparently doesn't see that the article has been updated, and shows the initial timestamp which is visually (and presumably SEOwise) not good : our new news looks like old news. Modifiying the URL would solve that issue, but could, may be, create another one : the new URL, being considered a new article, would lose, the acquired weight of the previous one in terms of referrals, social trafic and so on. Or not ? What do you think is the best option ? Thanks for your expertise, Yves
On-Page Optimization | | yves678901 -
URL structure
Hello all, I am about to sort out my websites link structure, and was wondering which approach to our services page would be best. should we have: services/digital-marketing & services/website-design etc or: digital-marketing/website-design & digital-marketing/seo Basically I see digital marketing as the top level category that is the umbrella term for all of our digital services. But would it make more sense to have service to be the main category and digital marketing within that (along with all the other services from web design to seo)? all thoughts welcome!
On-Page Optimization | | wseabrook0 -
Google Crawl Errors from vbseo change
We have vbseo setup on our site and for some reason a setting was changed unexpectedly and was un-noticed where it changed the URL of all the pages and so none of our pages were getting indexed by google any longer due to 401 errors. Most of our SE traffic fell off. We discovered the issue a couple weeks ago and we changed the setting back so that the URLs are the same as they were originally before but in Google webmasters it's still showing crawl errors and our search engine traffic hasn't recovered at all. We have sitemaps being sent daily.
On-Page Optimization | | RudySF0 -
Why Does Google Keep Changing My Page Titles?
I know Google has been doing this for quite some time but how do you "control" what Google will display as your page name? Lots of my pages come up with a title like "[searched keyword] - [website name]" in the search results. I usually a huge drop in CTR when this happens. On the other hand, there are some pages which have kept their title intact in the search results. So what gives? How come one page's title is changed and the other is not?
On-Page Optimization | | sbrault740 -
Slash at the end of a url
I keep reading contradicting information, so I figured I'll ask here. What's the best practice for slash '/' at the end of a URL? Should it be idealchooser.com/search/laptop/ or idealchooser.com/search/laptop (no trailing slash)? The options: 1. Accept both equally 2. Accept 1 and redirect the other with 301 3. Accept 1 and treat the other as a wrong URL returning 404 Which would be the best for SEO? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | corwin0 -
Keep our category navigation in tree structure but move our URLs to a more flat structure. Good plan?
In our Magento store, products are arranged into categories, subcategories and so on. We typically have 3 or 4 layers of category depth. This makes it nice and easy for customers to find stuff, but it means that the end categories have massive long urls. I'd like to keep our category tree structure in place from a navigation point of view, but I feel the url structure is pushing some important stuff to the back of the shop as it were. We have something like 200 categories in total. So, assuming every individual category has an a unique name, I'd like to rewrite the urls so that: ourshop.com/car-parts/
On-Page Optimization | | DWJames
stays as
ourshop.com/car-parts/ ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/
becomes
ourshop.com/suspension/ ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/springs
becomes
ourshop.com/springs/ ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/springs/thismake-lowering-springs
becomes
ourshop.com/thismake-lowering-springs/ and so on....
I'll need some custom magento URL rewrite work done, but that's another story. The real question is whether you guys feel this is worthwhile? Are there any other stores with a deep categorised navigation structure, but a flat url structure? thanks, James0 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0
