URL Structure - Is this correct? Programming Advice Needed
-
Hello
My father is having a website built called www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk. The site consists of different product categories as set out below
1.Engineered Wood, 2. Parquet & Reclaimed and 3. Prefinished Wood
filtering further into colours
1. /lights-greys/, 2. /beiges/, 3, /browns/ and 4. /darks-blacks
and then the brand name for example Vicenza. Example of a clean url **http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys/vicenza/ **
Each and every url is unique
Our programmer has put in place 301 redirects - http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys-engineered-wood/vicenza/ - Is this really needed? It does not look clean and will appear like this is Google. This is a completely new site, a new start up business.
I'm very confused as to why he has done this and concerned this method of programming does now follow "best practice". Can any programmer offer any advice? To get a better idea how the url structure is set out, I have attached a jpg image.
Thank you
Faye
-
Fantastic! Thanks Dean
-
Hi Faye,
Yes with custom taxonomies. Familiarise yourself with 'Basic diagram on taxonomies and their relationships in Wordpress' over at http://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies and also look at Taxonomy Generator here http://generatewp.com/taxonomy/ for a quick way.
There are also plugins such as http://wp-types.com/ that will allow you to do all this without coding.
-
so we can have our respective "colours" after our main sub categories, even though these colour categories are the same?
/prefinished-wood/browns/
/parquet-reclaimed/browns/
/engineered-wood/browns/
-
Hi Dean
Please don't apologise. Your feedback is really helpful. Do you know if we can create our preferred categories in word press?
-
Hi Faye,
Sorry for going off on a tangent. Personally I would go with the following (to avoid the 301 completely):
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/ as a parent page
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/verona as a child page
Then use categories to identify the colours as these are the product variants
Or switch it about to suit yourself, however I think the parent / child / category is the way forward unless you wish to create another taxonomy which is easy for any decent coder.
With custom taxonomies you can create whatever configuration you wish.
-
Hi Dean
This is directing away from my question, but yes - there is a big market for folks searching for these flooring types hence our keyword for this url is "black engineered wood". Our split categories allows us to have a more "diverse" keyword spectrum, which further reflects within our url, h1 and page title. Categorises will also allow us to add a variety of different products building our long tail keywords around this.
We probably could shorten the url from http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/darks-blacks/verona/ to http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered/darks-blacks/verona/ as the word "wood" exists within our primary domain name. Thanks for your input Dean, very much appreciated.
Faye
-
Hi,
Firstly I would ask myself, what would I want to see as a person looking for this product. Am I searching for the brand, the type of flooring or the colour
Do people know what engineered, prefinished, reclaimed wood is when looking for flooring, is verona only ever available as Dark Engineered Wood? if so then why have such along url structure.
Rather than:
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/darks-blacks/verona/Perhaps:
http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/verona
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 Urls
Hi All, I have a question I hope someone can help me with. I ran a scan on a website and it has a stack of urls that are far too long. I am going through and changing the urls to shorter ones. But my question is regarding redirections. Wordpress seems to be automatically redirecting the old urls to the new ones, should i be adding a more solid 301 in as well or is the wordpress redirect enough? I ask as they dont all seem to stay redirecting Thanks in advance for the help
Technical SEO | | DaleZon2 -
Received A Notice Regarding Spammy Structured Data. But we don't have any structured data or do we?
Got a message that we have spammy structured data on our site via webmaster tools and have no idea what they are referring to. We do not use any structured data using schema.org mark up. Could they be referring to something else? The message was: To: Webmaster of <a>http://www.lulus.com/</a>, Google has detected structured markup on some of your pages that violates our structured data quality guidelines. In order to ensure quality search results for users, we display rich search results only for content that uses markup that conforms to our quality guidelines. This manual action has been applied to lulus.com/ . We suggest that you fix your markup and file a reconsideration request. Once we determine that the markup on the pages is compliant with our guidelines, we will remove this manual action. What could we be showing them that would be interpreted as structured data, and or spammy structured data?
Technical SEO | | KentH0 -
Some URLs in the sitemap not indexed
Our company site has hundreds of thousands of pages. Yet no matter how big or small the total page count, I have found that the "URLs Indexed" in GWMT has never matched "URLS in Sitemap". When we were small and now that we have a LOT more pages, there is always a discrepancy of ~10% or so missing from the index. It's difficult to know which pages are not indexed, but I have found some that I can verify are in the Sitemap.xml file but not at all in the index. When I go to GWMT I can "Fetch and Render" missing pages fine - it's not as though it's blocked or inaccessible. Any ideas on why this is? Is this type of discrepancy typical?
Technical SEO | | Mase0 -
Need 301 Advice with a Recovered URL from a Domain Typosquatter
I am new to a SMB and someone bought the plural version of our domain back in 2005 and has yet to let it expire. The domain was just renewed for another year so we finally decided to contact a lawyer and go through the domain name dispute process. This seems like a pretty cut an dry case and the lawyer is very confident that we'll have the domain within 30-40 days. Currently the plural version domain 303s to spammy web pages, shows shady ads and is just a malicious looking page in general. I am not savvy enough to know the exact complexities of what's happening on the backend but it's spammy. Knowing the history of the plural version domain, how would you treat it after we acquire it? Obviously, I wouldn't want to put our site in jeopardy by 301ing the plural version of our URL to our current healthy site but at the same time many customers might go to that domain by accident so eventually I'd like to 301 it. If it's any help, the plural version has a robots.txt that prevent G from crawling it..thank you in advance for your guidance!
Technical SEO | | ssimarketing0 -
Need help with rel canonical!
I have a client who's MOZ crawl is coming back with 62 "notices" about rel canonical. Is this bad? On the report, it lists the url, then "Tag Value" as the home page.....what does this mean exactly? Are they pointing all the pages to the home page? I think I have 301 and rel can confused....
Technical SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
Duplicate Content on Navigation Structures
Hello SEOMoz Team, My organization is making a push to have a seamless navigation across all of its domains. Each of the domains publishes distinctly different content about various subjects. We want each of the domains to have its own separate identity as viewed by Google. It has been suggested internally that we keep the exact same navigation structure (40-50 links in the header) across the header of each of our 15 domains to ensure "unity" among all of the sites. Will this create a problem with duplicate content in the form of the menu structure, and will this cause Google to not consider the domains as being separate from each other? Thanks, Richard Robbins
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0 -
Advice on strange URL problem
I'm considering doing some pro bono work for a local non-profit and upon initial review they have a number of serious issues but there is one in particular I'd like to check my thinking on. The developer who set up the site some years ago implemented a javascript redirect on their root domain so that it redirects to: http://domain.com/wordpress This is wrong for all kinds of reasons and I want to recommend eliminating this redirect and getting rid of the 'wordpress' part of the path altogether. However, the site is quite established with good PR and they would take a hit by changing the path. I'd do 301 redirects to the new URLs that would not have 'wordpress' in the path in addition to other remediation. My question - is my thinking here good? It's worth it, right? The other option is just get rid of the weird redirect and keep 'wordpress' in the path but this seems unacceptable to me. Any opinions?
Technical SEO | | friendlymachine0
