URL Structure for Study Guides
-
I'm creating study guides for various musicals, plays and operas. A few issues:
- I want to easily view in Google Analytics data for all study guides, data at the category level (musical,play, opera) and data for an individual show.
- I want urls to be as short as possible for usability purposes.
- Some show titles are the same for shows in different categories. For example, there is the play Romeo and Juliet but there is also an opera Romeo and Juliet.
- Each study guide contains multiple sections that will live on different URLs (overview, context, plot summary, characters)
What would be the ideal URL structure? Here's what I was currently thinking we should use:
/show/play/romeo-juliet/
/show/play/romeo-juliet/context
/show/play/romeo-juliet/plot
/show/play/romeo-juliet/characters
-
Thanks! I think we'll go ahead and remove /shows from the URL structure and use Advanced Segments in Analytics.
-
Absolutely, what you would do is create an advanced segment in Google Analytics which includes all of the show types. That will give the same info.
There is even an alternative if you want to have this in the old way in Google Analytics, you would overwrite the usual pageview and create a custom one. For example on this page: /play/romeo-juliet the normal pageview would be: ga('send', 'pageview'); if you would change it to: ga('send', 'pageview', '/show/play/romeo-juliet'); it would still record the view in the old way. As I said, I don't like creating custom pageviews for this purpose.
-
If I don't use the /shows subdomain, is there still a good way to see in Google Analytics how much traffic is going to the study guides in general, regardless of show type?
-
Hi Jason,
Why not do it shorter and use: /play/romeo-juliet and /opera/romeo-juliet so you would drop the /show/ part out of the URL? Then /play/ or /plays/ would be an overview of all plays. Besides that I think you did a great job for the URL structure. You've checked if these are the keyword most people look for: content, plot, characters, right?
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
-
Organic reports showing a URL that isn't in Search Ask Question
In the image I've attached you can see that I have pulled a source/medium > google organic report. I've also made "landing page" my secondary dimension. The first landing page that is showing up is /v3/?slug=fnl, that is this page (https://orders.freshnlean.com/v3/?slug=fnl). You can see that the page has 230 sessions from Sep 3 - 9 and 17 transactions during that same time frame. The only thing is, that landing page is nowhere to be found in the SERPs. So how is it showing up in this report as having received google organic visitors that converted if it's not even in search? 05OclDp
Reporting & Analytics | | tdastru0 -
Redirecting all URLs appended with index.htm or index.html
It has come to my attention with one of my clients (WordPress website) that for some time they have within their Landing Page report (of GA - Google Analytics) URLs that should all be pointing to the one page, example: domain.com/about-us, also has a listing in GA as domain.com/about-us/index.htm Is this some kind of indication of a subdirectory issue? Has anyone had experience with this in such wordpress plugins as Yoast SEO, or other SEO plugin? My thoughts here are to simply redirect any of these non-existent files with a redirect in .htaccess - but what I'm using isn't working. I will insert the redirect here - - and any help would be greatly appreciated. RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html?
Reporting & Analytics | | cceebar
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html?$ http://www.dupontservicecenter.com/$1 [R=301,L] and this rewrite doesn't work: RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+).htm$ http://dupontservicecenter.com/$1.php [R,NC] _Cindy0 -
Direct traffic coming to URLs with /rss_feedIP#
I'm doing a site audit for an organization that has a bunch of really messy old Drupal sites. In looking at their traffic, I see that a majority of it is coming to landing pages that look like this: http://clientsdomain.com/rss_feed173.8.208.97 plus other IP addresses. The bounce rate is 100% and time on site is less than a second. It looks like something that an RSS feed tool might use, but I've never seen something like it before. It creates its own landing page, hits the site, then appears to bounce. This is making their Analytics data look a whole lot worse than the site is actually doing, since the bounce rate is 100% on all that fake traffic. I have some experience with Drupal, but I've never seen anything like this in Drupal or any other CMS. Has anyone out there ever experienced something like this, where direct traffic comes to an rss feed landing page and bounces immediately?
Reporting & Analytics | | newwhy0 -
Parenthesis in URL?
For some reason, we have some URLs on our site with parentheses in them such as somesite.com/used-this(that)What will parenthesis do to the ranking of those pages?
Reporting & Analytics | | CFSSEO0 -
Find out who mentioned my URL on Facebook
I am seeing a big spike in traffic coming from Facebook. The referrer looks like this (at least sometimes, mostly it is just https://m.facebook.com or http://www.facebook.com/😞 http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.terminretter.de%2F&h=rAQGSwECjAQGiZFaVEkz7U2od1RNFVtxhVQNG__EujSznUw&s=1 Is there a way to know who shared my URL on facebook?
Reporting & Analytics | | cengelhardt0 -
Get a list of robots.txt blocked URL and tell Google to crawl and index it.
Some of my key pages got blocked by robots.txt file and I have made required changes in robots.txt file but how can I get the blocked URL's list. My webmaster page Health>blocked URL's shows only number not the blocked URL's.My first question is from where can I fetch these blocked URL's and how can I get them back in searches, One other interesting point I see is that blocked pages are still showing up in searches.Title is appearing fine but Description shows blocked by robots.txt file. I need urgent recommendation as I do not want to see drop in my traffic any more.
Reporting & Analytics | | csfarnsworth0 -
The brainstorm of finding the reason of the URL decrease on original search result and the procedures of fixing the problem?
Hi guys: i just any one have some idea of how to find the mainly reasons of the listed position on google search original result decrease and the procedures of fixing those problem. Appreciate for any feedback. David
Reporting & Analytics | | skyten0 -
If I change the URL of a page, but the old page canonicalizes to the new, do I need to change my Analytics goals to get data?
I changed the URLs of some pages recently (because the same thing that affects the internal anchor text also affects the URL - grr...) but considered it not a big deal because even if I looked at the source code of the old URL, the canonical tag was now pointing to the new one. The question is - if I had URL destination goals set up for those URLs in Google Anlaytics, do I now have to change them? Or does Google somehow know that anyone getting to the new URL is the equivalent of someone getting to the old URL because of the canonical tag that exists on the old URL source code? I still do see goal conversions for some of the old URLs even since I changed them - but it could be that people are still somehow finding the old URL somewhere - or that Google only reindexed it a week or so after I made the change. Any light to shed? Thanks in advance, Aviva B
Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx0
