Directory site with an URL structure dilemma
-
Hello,
We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp).
Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages.
While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’.
One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest.
I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant.
My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them.
My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content.
With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts.
This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely.
Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way?
Many thanks,
Andras
-
You're welcome. As you might have guessed, I've tackled this problem myself a few times!!
-
Ok, this is something I can take as homework.
Thank you for having checked my issue in details.
-
It's painful, but that is your answer:
Q. Why isn't google ranking these pages better?
A. Because they are not unique or usefulGoogle can be annoyingly smart like that. The cheapest/easiest fix is probably to have a paragraph added to the top of each page. So your /budapest/jatekbolt page would have a paragraph about the wonderful choice of restaurants available in budapest and it's rich culinary heritage. (queue affordably copywriter to help keep them different).
You could also consider adding a field to your business database for "recommended snippet" which if filled in highlights that listing and gives a more in depth amount of information. You could the have someone look at reviews for the listings in key categories, pick our favourites and write a fresh description to those featured businesses.
The result of that will be a page that has more unique content and is in fact slightly more useful, That puts you in good standing for improved rankings.
-
Your assumption is correct about the snippets.
We either use part of the business description or some of the actual review wording on the category pages.
While I understand the importance of your suggestion, that is all I have about these businesses, and I add these snippets to the lists, so that I could increase CTR through previews.
Yes, there is no original content, basically just 'copied contents' from several pages, so the category page is total duplicate to nothing, but not genuine either.
Thank you again for your help.
-
Actually, I would say that uniqueness probably is an issue. keep in mind that I don't speak Hungarian,but it looks like everything on that page is a snippet from the sub pages. ie none of the text on that page is unique to that page. Is that correct?
Adding unique content at category level, even just a few lines of natural text that include the main keywords can make quite a difference. I've found it much harder to rank category pages that do not have that.
That would probably be my first job. Even if you just did it on a sample set of pages and monitored those for any improvement. Making them useful (and therefore attracting links) might be harder.
-
My guess would be that the bigger problem is not the URL structure, but the content on those category pages. The change you propose to the URL structure is good in terms of helping the business listing pages and in creating a logical hierarchy, but it isn't going to help those category pages.
I'd start with looking at:
- Content of the category pages : Do they have unique content. Is that content useful in it's own terms?
- Internal linking of category pages : Are you linking back up to the categories from the businesses, are you linking down to them ok. Are those links close to the top of the site hierarchy?
- External links: Are you getting links from other websites to those pages (easier if they are useful)
- On page optimisation: Are the category pages themselves well optimised
I'd question whether there is any benefit at all to your category pages in changing the URL structure of your business pages. However if there is some it's impact will pale to nothing compared to the above.
-
Thank you for your reply.
Your suggestion matches the actual way of how we handle the issue right now.
I have thought, that we might be able to improve the process a bit, but I am happy, that there is no need to change the way of how it works now.
-
Ok, when the question starts it sounds real easy to me but down the question it become too complex that it makes me confused on how to answer...
For Business listing I think it’s best to go with http://www.example.com/biz/my-business-name
For category pages the URL should be like http://www.example.com/oh/car-parts (oh represents the city name while car parts in the category)
All categories should come in all states for example if a person in California looks for car parts the url should be http://www.example.com/ca/car-parts
Reason why you should adopt this structure...
- Duplicate content issue will be eliminated
- URLs will not be so long so there will be no indexing issues
- Even if a business selects the multiple categories the content will not be duplicated.
Hope this helps...
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
-
Creating a .cn site with the existing site content
Hi all, I'm planning to create a .cn site. If I simply translate the existing content on my site (.com.au) into Chinese, do you think Google will see the .cn site as a duplicate of the main site? Will this cause any duplicate content issues? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | QuantumWeb620 -
Do sites with more pages rank better?
If a site has more pages and also has good internal linking, then logically it would rank better. Is this the case? Should I be building big (but high quality) sites?
On-Page Optimization | | T0BY0 -
Long URL's
So I'm super new at SEO and learning a lot. I'm a small business owner and enjoy doing it myself. Are long URL's good or bad? Like this: http://www.farnorthkennel.com/german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls/long-haired-german-shepherd-puppies-lava Is that too long? The german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls is an actual page with actual content. Do those hurt me?
On-Page Optimization | | Joshlaska0 -
Do https sites rank as well as http sites?
2 Questions: Question 1 - We currently have our entire site running on https (the http pages 301-redirect to the https versions). Assuming that the https pages load as quickly as the http versions, is it a problem that the entire site is https? The only official answer I've been able to find is this 2011 video where Matt Cutts basically says "I don't know" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeFo4ytOk8M Question 2 - Is there any problem with having half our site running on https only (with the http pages redirected), and the other half (our blog) running on http only (with all https blog pages redirected to the http versions)? Thanks in advance for any input! Justin
On-Page Optimization | | JustinClark0 -
SEO and multilanguage site
Hi all! I have used a wordpress plugin called WPML which translates a webpage into another language so that I have a webpage in two different languages (spanish (main market) and english). I'm just doing the seo for the spanish market and I'm gonna start with the seo for the english one. Should I do it just the same as I had a one-single-language page? just with english keywords, etc. I guessit would only differ in the way I do the linkbuilding strategy as the markets are different Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
What are the benefits of the URL meta tag?
We have too many meta tags and want to get rid of all the outdated ones. However, we don't want to eliminate valuable meta tags by mistake. So, before we say goodbye to the URL meta tag, we want to make sure we understand the pros and cons, if any. By the way, we are not referring to canonical URL tags, just URL as in:
On-Page Optimization | | GRIP-SEO0 -
On-Site Optimization and Repeat Customers
Hello, One of my clients has repeat customers. All of his surface level categories are optimized. None of his 2nd or 3rd level categories are optimized at all. Is there any harm in optimizing these 2nd or 3rd level categories. Is there any way it could cause a problem with repeat customers? I didn't think so but I want to make sure. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Keywords in URL:
what kind of URL should we use? www.keyword.net/keyword-city or www.keyword.net/city which URL you would prefer?
On-Page Optimization | | alibeef0