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.
-
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!
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 existing URL to boost SEO
What's best practice regarding changing URLs for SEO? If the page contains great information around a particular term but the URL is not reflective of this and thus the page isn't ranking should the URL be changed? Or is it always a hard and fast no? It would seem to make sense to me if the page didn't have any backlinks already and Organic clicks were minimal. Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Samsam00000 -
International Country URL Structure
Hey Guys, We have a www.site.com (gTLD) site, the primary market in Australia. We want to expand to US and UK. For the homepage, we are looking to create 3 new subfolders which are: site.com/au/ site.com/uk/ site.com/us/ Then if someone visits the site.com redirect based on their ip address to to the correct location. We are also looking to setup hreflang tags between the 3 sub-folders and set geo-location targeting in google search console at sub-folder level. Just wondering if this setup sounds ok for international SEO? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pladcarl90 -
Changing URLs
URLs of my web pages are based on the titles of pages. For sampel, if a title page is called "product ABC", then the URL for this page is /product-abc. Google and all other search engines have indexed all pages. Now I want to change the titles of some sites. Should I change the URLs accordingly, or should I rather leave URLs as they are. SEO Best Practice says that keywords must be placed both in the title, and in the URL. I think that Google will think that pages have douplicate content with diffrent titles, and it comes to many 404 error, if I change the URLs. What do you recommend in this case?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kian_moz0 -
Internal links and URL shortners
Hi guys, what are your thoughts using bit.ly links as internal links on blog posts of a website? Some posts have 4/5 bit.ly links going to other pages of our website (noindexed pages). I have nofollowed them so no seo value is lost, also the links are going to noindexed pages so no need to pass seo value directly. However what are your thoughts on how Google will see internal links which have essential become re-direct links? They are bit.ly links going to result pages basically. Am I also to assume the tracking for internal links would also be better using google analytics functionality? is bit.ly accurate for tracking clicks? Any advice much appreciated, I just wanted to double check this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
How much is the effect of redirecting an old URL to another URL under a new domain?
Example: http://www.olddomain.com/buy/product-type/region/city/area http://www.newdomain.com/product-type-for-sale/city/area Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow20130 -
Anchor text is a url, but not the one I want?
I am currently getting links to my site where the anchor text is, say, domainx.com. However, my website's url is domainy.com - the anchor text is the url of another website. Is this hurting my website in the SERPS, or making my link building look unnatural? The link is on the blog roll of another website, so it has produced hundreds, maybe thousands of copies of this anchor text link. Does that have any impact on my ranking as well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | redfishking0 -
Optimising a page for multiple keywords
I remember reading a question a while back about seo for a page targetting multiple keywords but I'm blowed if I can find it now.... I have a page which is optimised for one phrase and want to add 5-6 phrases/keywords... obviously I can't stuff the all the keywords in the page title or the header 1 tag. So I have written the content to mention the other keywords trouble is not wanting to compromise the quality of the page so of the keywords/phrases I have only been able to use once in the content. I assumed as the phrases are all on the same topic/area that this should not really matter. Apart from link building with the correct anchor text is there anything else I should be doing? The other option is to create custom pages for the keyword but again I am not keen on this idea.... Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Should you replace the url on a damaged page and 301 to it ?
Hi, We have a couple of pages which have been damaged due to an SEO person we hired creating a stupid amount of bookmarks and generally poor links. I've tried to get the links removed where I can but on most of these blogging sites there is no contact webmaster etc so I am struggling. Panda update as also affected traffic by about 35%. My question is , should I consider creating new urls for the "damaged " pages and then doing 301 redirects to them from the damaged page to the new page. Then start to build up good links to the new page whilst google should de-index the old pages over a couple of months ?. Just at my witts end how to get rid of these blogging rubbish etc etc. Thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0