Need advice on the better URL structure to go with
-
I am rebuilding our existing website on a new platform and need advice on which URL structure would be the most ideal. The following examples are of a product that we have with a very long page title. Not all of our products have titles this long, but enough of them do to cause some concern. I was also wondering if I should end the url with file type .html or if leaving it out is better. Thanks in advance!
OPTION 1. this example just uses the root domain and the entire product title separated by dashes
OPTION 2. this example uses the crawl path as well as the entire product title
OPTION 3. this example uses the crawl path and just the part number at the end since the folders already contain all the keywords necessary
-
Appreciate the feedback blue corona, and thanks for confirming Chris's suggestion. We are going to go with the advisement received.
-
Hi Robert!
I have to agree with Chris. Option 3 is the only one that my eyes didn't jumble all the characters together when glancing at it. While you definitely want some of the keywords in your URL for SEO purposes, short and sweet is definitely the optimal choice. I would definitely go with option 3 over the others.
As for the .html, leave that off. More modern websites are not utilizing the .html on their website URL so this will help make your website seem more up to date to users who might not know that much about URLs, etc. Good luck!
-
Thanks for your advice Chris.
-
Option 3 seems to be the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye and shortest option. For SEO purposes the shorter URL is often the best option because the keywords would potentially be displayed in the URL preview and be highlighted in bold. It's also not advisable to repeat keywords as in your other options. Leaving out the .html extension is the most common practice today and makes your website look more modern. Hope this helps you make a decision.
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 Structure on Category Pages
Hi, Currently, we having the following URL Structure o our product pages: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/283/All_Products.html Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/4/Clothing.html Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/product/LOAD-HE-WOM/Assorted-High-End-Women-Clothing-Lots.html?cid=4 Since we are going to use another frontend system, we are thinking about re-working on this URL Structure, using something like this: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/ Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/product-title/ I understand this is better for SEO and user experience. However, we already have good traffic on the current URL Structure. Should we use same left-side filters on Category Pages as in All Products Page? Since we are using Faceted Navigation, when users filter the Category (e.g. Clothing) they will see same page as Clothing Category Page. Is that an issue for Duplicate Content? Since we are a wholesale company - I understand is using "/wholesale/products/" in URL for all product pages a good idea? If so, should we avoid word "wholesale" in product-title to avoid repeated word in URL? For us, SKU in URL helps the company employees and maybe some clients identify the link. However, what do you think of using the SEO-friendly product-title, and 301 redirect it to www.viatrading.com/BRTA-LN-DISHRACKS/, so 1st link is only used by company members and Canonicalized 2nd is the only one seen by general public? Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | viatrading10 -
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 -
Should I use an acronym in my URL?
I know that Google understands various acronyms. Example: If I search for CRM System, it knows i'm searching for a customer relationship management system. However, will it recognize less known acronyms? I have a page geared specifically for SAP data archiving for human capital management systems. For those in the industry, they simply call it HCM. Here is how I view my options: Option #1: www.mywebsite.com/sap-data-archiving/human-capital-management Option #2: www.mywebsite.com/sap-data-archiving/hcm Option #3: www.mywebsite.com/sap-data-archiving/hcm-human-capital-management With option #3, i'm capturing the acronym AND the full phrase. This doesn't make my URL overly long either. Of course, in my content i'll reference both. What does everyone else think about the URL? -Alex
On-Page Optimization | | MeasureEverything0 -
Url structure with dash or slash
Hi There We have a content website. We don't rank well category image related searches but we get quite good traffic for those keywords. Those keywords are mostly like "category images". We want to change our url structure and we have 2 options now. 1- domain.com/category/category-images 2-domain.com/category/images option 1 repeats the category name so it looks spammy option 2 doesn't really have the keyword. any ideas which one tho choose? Thanks! ps: we don't want to use domain.com/category-images (too many root link)
On-Page Optimization | | muminaydin0 -
WordPress image urls - need a WP maven
We were having a conversation re urls that are indexed for images that are stored in various media plugins in WP. My question for anyone who is an uberWP person is: What is your opinion re best media storage plugins and how these URLs affect pages on a site for ranking, etc. I realize this is broad, but it is driven out of my concern that I cannot touch everything. When I see a url like this: http://www.drumbeatmarketing.net/wp-content/themes/drumbeat2/img/DB-LOGO-White.png I know there is no way with all the sites and clients we handle that I can get it perfect but this just bugs me for some reason. Should I just chill since it (seemingly) affects so little....?
On-Page Optimization | | RobertFisher1 -
Redirect both / and non-/ URLs?
I am doing SEO on WP site. Due to some duplicate pages (rel canonical was done before) I am doing 301 redirects at the moment. And I wonder if I need to redirect both links w/ and w/o trailing slash. Default is non www, w/o trailing slash. Like there is .com/category/news but there is same page linked in .com/news (well it works when permalink structure is set to /%category%/%postname% and returns 404 error when structure is set to /%postname%).
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ
I redirected .lt/naujienos to .lt/category/naujienos. Should I also redirect .lt/naujienos/ (with trailing slash)? There's absolutely no problem redirecting this, but there are some more pages which I want to edit their URLs and I wonder If I should do both redirects from links /w and w/o slash?1 -
Changing the url of a page
Hello. I would like to change the url of a page. It currently has very few inbound links. I would set up a 301 redirect to the new url. Is there anything else I should take into account before changing the url? Is there a downside to changing a url? Do inbound links carry the same value when a 301 redirect is involved? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Numbers in URL's - Search friendly or not?
Hi Mozzers, I have a client who has just launched a new website and we are having difficulties in making the URL's search friendly. I wont get into the technical aspects, but I'll explain the potential solutions the developers have given me. current: www.site.com/en/product/browse-by-product/37/22 Where 'en' stands for the English version of the website, 37 is the product category for example 'hard drives', and 22 is the product name or example 'seagate' Option to fix; www.site.com/en/p/product/hard-drives-37/seagate-22 This optional fix reduces the word product down to p, reduces 'browse by product' to 'product' and inserts the category and product names. Note the category identifier '37' has to be included in the URL, and the product identifier '22' also has to be in the URL. Obviously this is not great, but it is required at the moment. Best case scenario would be to have the URL like this... www.site.com/en/hard-drives/seagate So my question is, how far off the best case scenario is the option to fix? Scale of 1 to 10 would be good?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeyDorrington0