URL Optimisation Dilemma
-
First of all, I fully appreciate that I may be over analysing this, so feel free to highlight if you think I’m going overboard on this one.
I’m currently trying to optimise the URLs for a group of new pages that we have recently launched. I would usually err on the side of leaving the urls as they are so that any incoming links are not diluted through the 301 re-direct. In this case, however, there are very few links to these pages, so I don’t think that changing URLs will harm them.
My main question is between short URLs vs. long URLs (I have already read Dr. Pete’s post on this). Note: the URLs I have listed below are not the actual URLs, but very similar examples that I have created.
The URLs currently exist in a similar format to the examples below:
http://www.company.com/products/dlm/hire-ca
My first response was that we could put a few descriptive keywords in the url, with something like the following:
http://www.company/products/debt-lifecycle-management/hire-collection-agents - I’m worried though that the URL will get too long for any pages sitting under this.
As a compromise, I am considering the following:
http://www.company/products/dlm/hire-collection-agents
My feeling is that the second approach will give the best balance between having the keywords for the products and trying to ensure good user experience. My only concern is whether the /dlm/ category page would suffer slightly, but this would have ‘debt-lifecycle-management’ in the title tag.
Does this sound like a good approach to people? Or do you think I’m being a little obsessive about this? Any help would be appreciated
-
Makes sense - I understand now. Thanks for the clarification
-
Sure! What I mean is if (for example) your domain is debtlifestylemanagement.com, then having the dlm folder spelled out in the URL (i.e. debtlifestylemanagement.com/products/debt-lifecycle-management/hire-collection-agents) would be redundant & appear spammy. The same could happen if your domain had 'collection agents' in it.
I'm suggesting that I would "tend towards not including a keyword in the URI if it alreadyappears in the domain," especially if including it would only be for SEO purposes.
Founder & CEO at Schleicher Marketing
Technical SEO, eCommerce, CRO/UX Design, Migrations, Shopify+, Digital Strategy
Entrepreneur In Residence at StartupSD.org -
Thanks for your response Sheena, it's great to hear that I'm on the right track with this!
I was wondering if you could further explain the following part of your answer:
"What I can say is that the 'better way' depends on what words might already be in the domain, as I try to not be redundant (when possible) so it doesn't appear spammy/kw stuffed."
Are you suggesting that you'd tend towards not including a keyword if it appears elsewhere on the site and so search engines have enough context? Also, what do you mean by 'redundant'?
-
I'd say you're thinking about this in a smart way. First off, the existing URL structure isn't bad. I would consider this a low priority update, unless (or until) all other possible site issues are taken care of.
You're being smart about trying to find a balance of having descriptive yet not too long of a URL structure. What I can say is that the 'better way' depends on what words might already be in the domain, as I try to not be redundant (when possible) so it doesn't appear spammy/kw stuffed.
I hope this helps!
Founder & CEO at Schleicher Marketing
Technical SEO, eCommerce, CRO/UX Design, Migrations, Shopify+, Digital Strategy
Entrepreneur In Residence at StartupSD.org
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
-
Trailing Slashes on URLs
Hi we currently have a site on Wordpress which has two version of each URL trailing slash on URLs and one without it. Example: www.domain.com/page (preferred version - based on link data) www.domain.com/page**/** The non-slash version of the URL has most of the external links pointing to them, so we are going to pick that as the preferred version. However, currently, each version of every URL has rel canonical tag pointing to the non-preferred version. E.g. www.domain.com/page the rel canonical tag is: www.domain.com/page/ What would be the best way to clean up this setup? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Www. or naked url?
Hi everyone, I am about to start a new WordPress site and debating whether to use www or naked URL for the URL structure. Using naked URL makes sense from a branding and minimalistic perspective but I am reading that using naked URL might have some technical deficiencies. Specifically, cookie issues and DNS can't be cname. Are these technical deficiencies still valid when using naked url? Would appreciate any feedback on this! Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nsereke1 -
How to switch from URL based navigation to Ajax, 1000's of URLs gone
Hi everyone, We have thousands of urls generated by numerous products filters on our ecommerce site, eg./category1/category11/brand/color-red/size-xl+xxl/price-cheap/in-stock/. We are thinking of moving these filters to ajax in order to offer a better user experience and get rid of these useless urls. In your opinion, what is the best way to deal with this huge move ? leave the existing URLs respond as before : as they will disappear from our sitemap (they won't be linked anymore), I imagine robots will someday consider them as obsolete ? redirect permanent (301) to the closest existing url mark them as gone (4xx) I'd vote for option 2. Bots will suddenly see thousands of 301, but this is reflecting what is really happening, right ? Do you think this could result in some penalty ? Thank you very much for your help. Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JeremyICC0 -
Cleaning up backlinks and changing URLs
Currently we are performing very poorly in organic clicks. We are a e-commerce site with over 2000 products. Issues we thought plagued us: Copied Images from competitors Site wide duplicate content duplicate content from competitor site Number of internal links on a page (300+) Bad backlinks (2.3k from 22 domains and ips) being linked to from sites like m.biz URLs URLs are abbreviated, over 50% lack our keywords Lack of meta descriptions, or too long meta descriptions Current State of fixing these issues: 50% images are now our own Site wide duplicate content near 100% completed Internal links have been dealt with Rewrote content for every product 90% of meta descriptions are fixed From all of these changes we have yet to see increase in traffic...10% increase at best in organic clicks. We think we have penalties on certain URLs. My question for the MOZ community is what is the best way to attack the lack of organic clicks. Our main competition is getting 900% more clicks than us. Any more information you need on the topic let me know and will get back to you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
Changing your URL? Impact on rankings?
I have been thinking about changing our webadres for quite a while but I'm too afraid of the impact on my SERP. I understand I would need to use the Google Change of Address tool & 301 redirects. Am I missing something? What is your experience with changing the URL of a website? How has this impacted your SERP? In the past I heard someone say it will damage the linkjuice by 20%. Is that accurate? If you change the URL, is there a blank period of where your old site nor your new site are indexed? Or does Google handle this transition well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Penguin Penalty On A Duplicate url
Hi I have noticed a distinct drop in traffic to a page on my web site which occurred around April of last year. Doing some analysis of links pointing to this page, I found that most were sitewide and exact match commercial anchor text. I think the obvious conclusion from this is I got slapped by Penguin although I didn't receive a warning in Webmaster Tools. The page in question was ranking highly for our targeted terms and the url was structured like this: companyname.com/category/index.php The same page is still ranking for some of those terms, but it is the duplicate url: companyname.com/category/ The sitewide problem is associated with links going to the index.php page. There aren't too many links pointing to the non index.php page. My question is this - if we were to 301 redirect index.php to the non php page, would this be detrimental to the rankings we are getting today? ie would we simply redirect the penguin effect to the non php page? If anybody has come across a similar problem or has any advice, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sicseo0 -
Is it worth switching from underscores to hyphens in the URL?
I work for a website that recently did a redesign, and switched from hyphens to underscores. We have seen some drop in traffic, although that may be attributed to the migration. I have read that while Google prefers hyphens, the underscore problem is not as much of an issue as it used to be. Is it worth 301'ing the page to a version of itself with hyphens instead of underscores in the URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Htaccess Redirect with %C2%A0 in URL
Below is my setup for redirects in .htaccess file in my root word press installation. The www to non-www works well, so no problems there Other page redirects work well, too (example: redirect 301 /some-page/ http://mysite.com/another-page/ (I didn't post those because I have a few too many : ) So here it goes... RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pepsimoz
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L] BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress redirect 301 /archives/10-college- majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%20majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ I'm having a problem with the last 301 redirect: redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ not working... As you can see I've tried using other varations of the "space" but no go. I also used a redirect in cPanel's Redirect screen; testing all the possible options + wildcard I've also tried this: http://serverfault.com/questions/201829/using-special-characters-in-apache-mod-rewrite-rule (perhaps unsuccessfully, because it caused a 500 server error and it's a different situation in my case) I also saw something here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3908682.htm but I don't know if it works and how I would implement that + do so without compromising ALL other redirects. Note: the URL displays with a space in the address bar of all major web browsers: http://mysite.com/10-college- majors/ and goes to a 404 page I have a goregous page / PR6 / high authority site linking to the URL on my site, but they copied the URL with a space somehow. I contacted the person responsible for the website and he claims it works fine (aka he didn't check it). Is there a clean way to redirect ONLY this problematic URL without compromising other redirects, etc? Any ideas would be great. I'll respond with progress. Thanks in advance. UPDATE the redirect works, and it did work. Even so, when looking at source of page linking to mine, the URL looks like this: ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college- majors/ Clicking the URL in Source View in FireFox takes me to ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ none of my 301 redirects should direct there. I don't have any redirect plugins either.0