Need URL structure suggestions
-
On my website I am in the process of creating expat city guides for different cities in Cambodia. I've already gotten three up, but I am worried that my URL structure is not the best, so I am wondering if I should fix it before I put the rest up.
Right now the city guides are housed here: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/
There's a section for each city, this one is for Battambang: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang
And then there are sections for hotels, restaurants, etc. movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang/battambang-hotels-and-accommodation
So once you finally get to a review for an individual hotel or activity, the URL is really long, like this: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang/battambang-hotels-and-accommodation/classy-hotel
Should I just par the section names down so the URL would be something like this: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ ?
I was hoping by having the long URLs slugs for my section pages, such as "battambang-hotels-and-accommodation" they would be more likely to show on search terms like "Battambang hotels" than if the section was just "accommodation." However, this whole section is getting much less search traffic than anything else on my site, so I am wondering if it is because of these ridiculously long URLs. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
-
Can it be that the traffic from Google are expats? Since it's hard to give people a face solely based on Google Analytics data. Either way you look at it, I think the best solution is the one that services your visitors and is SEO friendly. And if you’re facing the situation you can’t choose between the two, I would always stick with designing for people instead of search engines.
Since search engines are getting pretty smart in detecting unnatural “optimalisation” and a good user experience results indirect in good rankings (dwell time for example) as well.
-
Thank you. The problem is that my target audience (expats in Cambodia or coming to Cambodia) is not my actual audience. For this sort of thing, I get most of my traffic from people coming from Google searches. The site has been up for several years now (although the guides are relatively new) and this pattern has remained steady. I am not sure if I should be designing for the audience I want or the audience I have.
-
Hi Lina,
It would keep the URL's short and descriptive for your visitors and more important in the SERP's which could increase your CTR.
Besides that, my experience is that people look for either an hotel or information about the place. Although they will find the information useful at some point the starting of a search (entering the query in Google) will focus on either information about the place or information about the hotels.
This way I would split the information on your website as well and make sure you point your visitors to it with internal links or buttons.
That’s just my point of view, asking your target audience about this is a great way to make decisions as well!
-
I could, but it would ruin my sidebars. Also, my idea is that people will be looking at all of the stuff for one particular city, so it makes sense to keep each city in its own subfolder.
What do you think the advantage is to having the hotels in their own subfolder? I was thinking about re-doing the sidebars manually anyway (right now they are automatic based on the Wordpress structure)
-
-
Hi Lina,
Can't you just make a page for city guides and one for hotels and use those as head pages and put the rest under those?
So
head page: hotels
under that: battambang and under that one the classy hotels page
And for the guide something like:
head page: expat city's
under that: battanbang guide
Just an idea, good luck with redirecting!
-
-
Thank you! I use the term hotels much more, but I used 'accommodation and hotels' because some of the places are guesthouses, not hotels, etc.
I'm using Wordpress so there's no easy way for me to get the /expat-city-and-island-guides/ out of the URL, but I can shorten it to /expat-city-guides/ or even /city-guides/. I might keep expat because it's an important keyword for me. For the same reason (Wordpress structure) I can't move battambang after accommodations without changing the whole site structure (and design) which I don't think I am willing to do.
I think I'll try movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/hotels/classy-hotel
Seems more manageable and readable. Now I just need to set up 301s on all of the old pages....eep.
-
Hi Lina500,
I think you’re right about changing this before moving on. In any website we develop website structure comes before content creation.
I understand your concern about keywords in the URL and the length of the URL. The current URL is pretty confusing for your visitors and is probably too long to read.
Gladly for you, Google doesn’t put too much weight on keywords in your URL and they are getting better and better at understanding what pages are about. A Word like accommodations will be known as a close variant of hotels for example. This way a descriptive URL is just fine.
In your situation I would find out what words are used most. For example:
Accommodations vs hotels
Island guides vs city guides
If the most searched keyword describes the page I would pick that one. If however the other keyword fits the content of that page best I would pick the other keyword.
Your own suggestion movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ seems like a pretty good one to me.
I would only skip /expat-city-guides/ and make it movetocambodia.com/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ since these are keywords that get used combined. People won’t search for city guide classy hotel for example.
In the ideal situation I would go for /expat city guides/battambang/ for the city guides and put your accommodation overview under /accommodations/battambang/classy-hotel/ (without /expat-city-guides/ before it.).
I hope this helps!
-
I'd suggest you to incorporate "Breadcrumbs" approach in managing your links for search engines as you can easily map your link structure. It will be something like this:
expat-city-and-island-guides >> battambang >> battambang-hotels-and-accommodation >>classy-hotel
As far as the current links are concerned, I don't think you need to insert city names in URL multiple times. Come up with descriptive but short URL for each page as you've already implemented the "Breadcrumbs", search engines will understand how your site is structured.
For more info about Breadcrumbs, check out this post from Ann Smarty:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/breadcrumbs/15022/ -
Thanks! Just had a look at these links, very helpful. In my above examples, do you think having the city name in the URL more than once makes it look spammy? I am not sure if I should change these since the pages are already up for a few months or if I should just be more brief in the new guides.
-
Hey Lina,
I'd suggest you to take a look at these posts from Rand for better understanding,
https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
https://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urlsHonestly speaking, the long URLs doesn't bother search engines, they can process them without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and UX.
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
-
International URL Structures
Hi everyone! I've read a bunch of articles on the topic, but I can't seem to be able to figure out a solution that works for the specific case. We are creating a site for a service agency, this agency has offices around the world - the site has a global version (in English/French & Spanish) and some country specific versions. Here is where it gets tricky: in some countries, each office has a different version of the site and since we have Canada for example we have a French and an English version of the site. For cost and maintenance reason, we want to have a single domain : www.example.com We want to be able to indicate via Search Console that each subdomain is attached to a different country, but how should we go about it. I've seen some examples with subfolders like this: Global FR : www.example.com/fr-GL Canada FR: www.example.com/fr-ca France: www.example.com/fr-fr Does this work? It seems to make more sense to use : **Subdirectories with gTLDs, **but I'm not sure how that would work to indicate the difference between my French Global version vs. France site. Global FR : www.example.com/fr France : www.example.com/fr/fr Am I going about this the right way, I feel the more I dig into the issue, the less it seems there is a good solution available to indicate to Google which version of my site is geo-targeted to each country. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | sarahcoutu150 -
How do I deindex url parameters
Google indexed a bunch of our URL parameters. I'm worried about duplicate content. I used the URL parameter tool in webmaster to set it so future parameters don't get indexed. What can I do to remove the ones that have already been indexed? For example, Site.com/products and site.com/products?campaign=email have both been indexed as separate pages even though they are the same page. If I use a no index I'm worried about de indexing the product page. What can I do to just deindexed the URL parameter version? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | BT20090 -
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 W09qswW.jpg
Technical SEO | | Faye2341 -
What directory should a site go in (url structure)?
Hi All, The is the first actual SEO campaign i've worked on and I had a few question about where the site should live on the server and url structure. The site is in WP and we're using Yoast SEO. Anyway the site lives in a a folder called Coastal, which is a child of the WWW folder. So the permalink of the homepage is mcoastalwindows.com/coastal/. The URL is mycoastalwindows.com. The thing is I can still get to the homepage or any of the pages on the site by typing in the /coastal/. Another example is permalink mycoastalwndows.com/coastal/siding/ and url mycoastalwindows.com/siding/. The urls always display without the /coastal/, so I'm not too worried about people linking to them, but Yoast puts a canonical element to the permalink and always includes the /coastal/. Also I'm seeing that Google displays a lot of the urls with the /coastal/, which is an issue seeing as we don't link to the pages that way. My original thought was to solve this at the source and just move everything out of the coastal directory, but the developer swears that it's more secure being in another folder especially with WP. What would you all do and what is best practice? Would you move everything out of the coastal folder, 301 re-direct, do something with. htaccess, or another solution? Appreciate the input thanks!
Technical SEO | | Mario.Souza0 -
How to handle temporary campaign URLs
Hi, We have just run a yearly returning commercial campaign for which we have created optimized URL's. (e.g. www.domain.tld/campaign including the category and brand names after the campaign www.domain.tld./campaign/womens This has resulted in 4500+ URL's being indexed in Google including the campaign name, now the campaign is over and these URL's do not exist anymore. How should we handle those URL's? 1.) 301 them to the correct category without the campaign name 2.) Create a static page www.domain.tld/campaign to which we 301 all URL's that have the campaign name in them Do you have any other suggestions on what the best approach would be? This is a yearly commercial campaign so in a year time we will have the same URL's again. Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | eCommerceSEO0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
Dynamic URLs via Refinements
What is the best way to handle large product pages with many different refinement possibilities. Ex. hard drive - 40 gigs - black case etc. All of these refinements add to the length of the url and potentially create crawling issues as the url is to dynamic. I have seen people canonical all refinements and pages to the main cat page, I have seen others no follow certain refinements. Also in the SEOmoz crawling report it tells me that over two parameters is bad. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Gordian0