Does this URL need rewriting?
-
Hello,
Does this URL need to be rewritten?
http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/modelingwithnlparticleandreas.html
Bob
-
I'm actually not going to rewrite the URL since, based on the responses, it's not too spammy. I was just wondering if it was spammy since it was long and jumbled.
But what an awesome post by Paul Thompson! Taught me a couple of things!
Thanks!
-
Hi Bob,
Some good points by Thompson Paul.
I am more interested in knowing how are you going to rewrite the URL?
The website is hosted on nginx/1.4.5.
I know about IIS Server - You require an ISAPI rewrite module. For Apache you can do it manually, but how would you go about doing it in this server?
- Sajeet
-
If I were re-writing this URL, I'd do www.nlpca.com/DCweb/modeling-with-nlp.html in order to help the SEs understand the word boundaries in the keyword phrase.
But this is good example of getting lost in the weeds of SEO. Changing the URL is going to have only very slight effect. On the other hand, put bluntly, the article itself is very poorly optimised. You'd have vastly greater effect by spending your time improving the article itself instead of fussing with the URL. Prioritise the biggest effects first.
- I assume the target phrase is "modeling with NLP" and yet that phrase only appears in the meta title and title - nowhere else on the page. Obviously you don't want to spam the page with keywords, but only a single mention of the target phrase means you'll have a very hard time ranking the phrase. I realise it's a reposting of an existing article, but since it's your own article, there's no reason you can't update the content a little for web purposes. (If in fact you're targeting the term "NLP article" you're targeting far too broad (and essentially unrelated) a term with that page)
- The meta-description is essentially worthless as a call-to-action to encourage a searcher to want to read the page. It's awkwardly phrased and shows no value proposition to the searcher for reading.
- Page is visually a mass of text. I'm not a fan of decoration for the sake of decoration ("dancing macaroni" as my old designer friend calls it) but breaking this up with pull quotes, an appropriate related image, a flow chart etc would make it much more readable and less visually intimidating.
- The biggie: Page has only 1 incoming link and only 1 social share. Spending time getting social exposure and conversation going about the article would go a lot further than fussing with the URL. (Although the site also has no basic Open Graph schema, so that's a bit of a hindrance, but if you don't control the site, that point is probably moot).
So there's my perspective. Focus your time on the things that could seriously move the needle for the page, before fussing with a minor detail like changing the URL wording.
Dos that make sense?
Paul
-
You could re-write it to be http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/modelingwithnlp but you don't have too. What are you trying to accomplish with this page?
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 disappeared from the search results
Hey folks, A URL on my webpage that has been climbing in search results ever since has suddenly completely disapeared from the search results and i'm absolutely stuck - no idea what the reason might be. It was ranked #11 for the targeted keyword, than it slightly started dropping down to #14 and #17 after which it completely disappeared, not only for specific targeted keyword, but also for exact name of the product. The URL has vanished from search results. I looked in search console, no particular errors or messages from Google. The only case I might come with is that many URLs are cannonicaly linked to the URL in matter, but i don't assume this might be the case. Does anyone have a suggestion what might the reason why the URL has completely vanished from the search results? Thank you a lot. The URL: http://chemometec.com/cell-counters/cell-counter-nc-200-nucleocounter/ Targeted keyword: 'cell counter'
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Chemometec0 -
URL Shortners Question
Does anyone know if there are any URL shortners that track when googlebot visits them? I want to know when googlebot visits a shortened link that does NOT got to a URL I control. Any ideas would be much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Is horizontal hashtag linking between 4 different information text pages with a canonical tag to the URL with no hashtag, a White Hat SEO practice?
Hey guys, I need help. hope it is a simple question : if I have horizontal 4 text pages which you move between through hashtag links, while staying on the same page in user experience, can I canonical tag the URL free of hashtags as the canonical page URL ? is this white hat acceptable practice? and will this help "Adding the Value", search queries, and therefore rank power to the canonical URL in this case? hoping for your answers. Best Regards, and thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
Can I 301 redirect old URLs to staging URLs (ex. staging.newdomain.com) for testing?
I will temporarily remove a few pages from my old website and redirect them to a new domain but in staging domain. Once the redirection is successful, I will remove the redirection rules in my .htaccess and get the removed pages back to live. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Solved PayDay hack - but SERPs show URLs - what should I do?
We had the PayDay hack - and solved it completely. The problem is - the SERPs have over 3,000 URLs pointing to 404 on our website all of which have urls that are like this: <cite>www.onssi.com/2012/2/post1639/payday-loan-companies-us</cite> What should I do? Should I disavow every one of the 3,000? No Follow?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ocularis0 -
I need de-spam help/advice
For one of my sites I am working on I outsourced SEO about 3 years ago. One of the "tricks" the SEO used at the time was to pay for several Blog posts to be "sponsored" by this web site using exact match keywords for the domain. 1 Where do I look to determine the spammy links pointing to this site? 2 Have you had success getting rid of these bad links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kadesmith0