Hlp with site setup
-
Hi there and thanks for the great information, certainly lots to take in.
Can anyone suggest the best way to setup product / category url structure for a store?
At the moment we have something like domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html
As the product url, we edited url structure using a plugin, we don't use default WooCommerce url settings.
domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html. this can sometimes be long
But when you click on the product the url changes to the following.
domainname.com/product name.html. This can shorted the url by 40% and still have keyword in url
Is there any benefit in doing his? Re canonical urls, I only have about 15 products that are selected in many categories.the other 200 are under once category only.
Product pages don't have many backlinks at the moment.
Thanking you so much.
-
HI seoelevated thaks again for taking the time to explain.
That helps a lot and will adjust the site accordingly, it makes sense.
-
To my understanding, a redirect and a canonical are treated very similarly from an SEO standpoint. With either of these, only the end URL (either the one to which you are redirecting, or the one linked in the canonical reference) is the one which, if all directives are honored, gets indexed. So, unless I'm missing something, there is no benefit at all of having the category paths in the URLs if you are either redirecting from those to the flat one, or if you are pointing a canonical to the flat one. The benefit would be there if those keywords were in the final URL (redirected or canonical). But if the final URL is flat, then I don't think you get any benefits from the non-canonical URLs having keywords in their paths. So, if the flat URL is the final one, from either method, I would ensure that the "product name" is fully descriptive with the desired keywords.
-
Hi seoelevated, thanks for taking the time to explain.
The reason for asking was that I noticed many sites that rank well within our industry display the full path in their urls, for example, domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html and this allows them to do as you suggested, have keywords in the category, then sub cat and then finally the product title.
Many when clicking on a product remove the categoy urls completely, something like this, domainname.com/product name.html and I didn't understand why but it makes sense now. I just thought that there might have been an SEO benefit to doing this.
Looking at our site we do have the following setup link href="https://www.domainname.com/category/subcat/product.html/" rel="canonical" so I assume that this tells google the right path to follow. I think that the disadvantage here is that urls can become quite long so they need to be optimised, much shorter than they are now.
As of accessing urls from many locations, some articles that you read say that the url should only be accessible from one path which was my worry. Although the cannical url tag is there I dont know if its it hurts our website if you can still access from all of the following, is this okay or should I not worry about it.
domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html
domainname.com/subcategory/product name.html
domainname.com/product name.html
domainname.com/parentcategory/product name.html -
The benefit of the directory paths approach is the additional keywords, if your product name (or ID) is not in itself descriptive enough. For example, if you have a sofa style named "Diana", you wouldn't want your URL to be domainname.com/diana.html. Something like domainname.com/furniture/sofas/diana.html would be better.
But, you can accomplish that with more descriptive product IDs. So, in the example above, if you could make your product name "furniture-sofas-diana", then your URL would be domainname.com/furniture-sofas-diana.html, which accomplishes the same keyword targeting.
And then that solves the issue of when products are in multiple categories, since it's a flat URL regardless of how the visitor arrived to the page.
But if your products are really almost entirely in a single category each (keeping in mind temporary categories like "sale", "new", etc.), and they will be that way forever, then there is an argument to be made for the paths. Because it does help the search engine to parse up your site, and to provide nice breadcrumbs on your listings.
This is really a perennial debate. And there's no one answer. For most of us, we do have to live with products being in multiple categories, as the norm (especially when considering categories like sale, new, best sellers, etc.). Canonical reference links help this issue, but aren't necessarily ideal.
But, what really struck me in your question was that you said the URL changes when you click on the product. Ideally, you don't want all your internal links to be redirects. That's something I would try to avoid.
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
-
How to make second site in same niche and do white hat SEO
Hello, As much as we would like, there's a possibility that our site will never recover from it's Google penalties. Our team has decided to launch a new site in the same niche. What do we need to do so that Google will not mind us having 2 sites in the same niche? (Menu differences, coding differences, content differences, etc.) We won't have duplicate content, but it's hard to make the sites not similar. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
How would you optimize a new site?
Hi guys, im here to ask based on your personal opinion. We know in order to rank in SEO for a site is to make authority contents that interest people. But what would you do to increase your ranking of your site or maybe a blog post? leaving your link on blogs comment seem dangerous, nowadays. Is social media the only way to go? Trying to get people to write about you? what else can be done?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
Do legitimately earned links from unrelated sites help or hurt?
We have a few charity events coming up that have offered to link back to our homepage. While we do genuinely like the charities we are going to sponsor, I'm not sure how those links will look seo-wise. For example, one is for the local high school basketball team and another is for a Pediatric Care Mud Run. To a human, these links make perfect sense, but to a robot, I'm not sure if it differentiates these links from spam/some negative link. Granted, I understand that a small percentage of links probably won't do anything either way, but I'd like to ignore that for the purposes of my question. All things being equal, do links such as these help or hurt? Thanks for your time and insight, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Identifying why my site has a penalty
Hi, My site has been hit with a google penalty of some sort, but it doesn't coincide with a penguin or panda update. I have attached a graph of my visits that demonstrates this. I have been working on my SEO since the latter part of last year and have been seeing good results, then all of a sudden my search referrals dropped by 70%. Can anyone advise on what it could be? Thanks! Will XBvZq2e
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | madegood0 -
Is my competitor up to no good? Strange site-explorer results.
I'm researching a competitor using site explorer and the seomoz toolbar and getting some strange results. When you search by the domain name in site explorer you get no results, but the toolbar shows 170K incoming links. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com I noticed the top referring page was a strange internal url so I ran that through site explorer and discovered 19 links.. When you put the strange link in a browser, it redirects to the home url;.. At this url the toolbar shows 220 links and semoz shows 19 http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/?xid_78e7f=0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com%2F%3Fxid_78e7f%3D0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c What is up with that url? What are they doing? This is a site ranking #1 for my local search term even though he has about 50 pages of almost duplicate content. See link below. I'm really scratching my head here. http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/home.php?all=categories
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dwallner0 -
Site Maps
I have provided a site maps for google but although it craws my site www.irishnews.com at 6:45AM the details in the site map are not seen on google for a few days - any ideas how to get this feature working better would be great. example <url><loc>http://www.irishnews.com/news.aspx?storyId=1126126</loc>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Liammcmullen
<priority>1</priority>
<lastmod>2012-01-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>never</changefreq></url> thanks0 -
Merging four sites into one... Best way to combine content?
First of all, thank you in advance for taking the time to look at this. The law firm I work for once took a "more is better" approach and had multiple websites, with keyword rich domains. We are a family law firm, but we have a specific site for "Arizona Child Custody" as one example. We have four sites. All four of our sites rank well, although I don't know why. Only one site is in my control, the other three are managed by FindLaw. I have no idea why the FindLaw sites do well, other than being in the FindLaw directory. They have terrible spammy page titles, and using Copyscape, I realize that most of the content that FindLaw provides for it's attorneys are "spun articles." So I have a major task and I don't know how to begin. First of all, since all four sites rank well for all of the desired phrases-- will combining all of that power into one site rocket us to stardom? The sites all rank very well now, even though they are all technically terrible. Literally. I would hope that if I redirect the child custody site (as one example) to the child custody overview page on the final merged site, we would still maintain our current SERP for "arizona child custody lawyer." I have strongly encouraged my boss to merge our sites for many reasons. One of those being that it's playing havoc with our local places. On the other hand, if I take down the child custody site, redirect it, and we lose that ranking, I might be out of a job. Finally, that brings me down to my last question. As I mentioned, the child custody site is "done" very poorly. Should I actually keep the spun content and redirect each and every page to a duplicate on our "final" domain, or should I redirect each page to a better article? This is the part that I fear the most. I am considering subdomains. Like, redirecting the child custody site to childcustody.ourdomain.com-- I know, for a fact, that will work flawlessly. I've done that many times for other clients that have multiple domains. However, we have seven areas of practice and we don't have 7 nice sites. So child custody would be the only legal practice area that has it's own subdomain. Also, I wouldn't really be doing anything then, would I? We all know 301 redirects work. What I want is to harness all of this individual power to one mega-site. Between the four sites, I have 800 pages of content. I need to formulate a plan of action now, and then begin acting on it. I don't want to make the decision alone. Anybody care to chime in? Thank you in advance for your help. I really appreciate the time it took you to read this.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SDSLaw0 -
Is it possible that since the Google Farmer's Update, that people practicing Google Bowling can negatively affect your site?
We have hundreds of random bad links that have been added to our sites across the board that nobody in our company paid for. Two of our domains have been penalized and three of our sites have pages that have been penalized. Our sites are established with quality content. One was built in 2007, the other in 2008. We pay writers to contribute quality and unique content. We just can't figure out a) Why the sites were pulled out of Google indexing suddenly after operating well for years b) Where the spike in links came from. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dahnyogaworks0