Shortening URL's
-
Hello again Mozzers,
I am debating what could be a fairly drastic change to the company website and I would appreciate your thoughts.
The URL structure is currently as follows
Product Pages
www.url.co.uk/product.htmlCategory Pages
www.url.co.uk/products/category/subcategory.htmlI am debating removing the /products/ section as i feel it doesn't really add much and lengthens the url with a pointless word. This does mean however redirecting about 50-60 pages on the website, is this worth it? Would it do more damage than good? Am i just being a bit OCD and it wont really have an impact?
As always, thanks for the input
-
Unless you're already not ranking well, changing URLs is a big risk, honestly. I don't think you're likely to see much gain, if any, by dropping one fairly sensible word/subfolder from your URL structure, the risk and work involved to set it up with 301s and the like far outweighs the benefit, which is questionable at best to start. I wouldn't do it unless I was burning it down and starting over.
-
Sorry the wording made this seems unclear
The /products/ section isn't a product. It is a parent category called Products,
Our set-up is domain.com/cateogry/sub-cat/sub-cat/
but the main category is called "products".
It is this main parent category im thinking of removing and moving all other category 1 step up the hierarchy.
-
I am a little confused, normal ecommerce websites usually work as domain.com/category/subcategory/products and as your URL structure contains product/category I believe this is not a common scenario.
Here are my general recommendations.
- If you are changing the URL structure and removing products from the URL, see how many external links are pointing to the internal pages as even if you set proper 301, some of the link juice will be lost and that will impact your rankings.
- Around 50 redirections are not that much so you can do it all at once but before doing that you should have to have a plan B in-case of anything goes wrong.
- The rankings and traffic are going to go down for a bit so you have to have a plan to get some new links so that the traffic and ranking can be restored.
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
-
How Many Words To Make Content 'unique?'
Hi All, I'm currently working on creating a variety of new pages for my website. These pages are based upon different keyword searches for cars, for example used BMW in London, Used BMW in Edinburgh and many many more similar kinds of variations. I'm writing some content for each page so that they're completely unique to each other (the cars displayed on each page will also be different so this would not be duplicated either). My question is really, how much content do you think that I'll need on each page? or what is optimal? What would be the minimum you might need? Thank for your help!
Technical SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
How can I see the SEO of a URL? I need to know the progress of a specific landing-page of my web. Not a keyword, an url please. Thanks.
I need to know the evolution on SEO of a specific landing-page (an URL) of my web. Not a keyword, a url. Thanks. (Necesito saber si es posible averiguar el progreso de una URL específica en el posicionamiento de Google. Es decir, lo que hace SEOmoz con las palabras clave pero al revés. Yo tengo una url concreta que quiero posicionar en las primeras posiciones de Google pero quiero ver cómo va progresando en función a los cambios que le voy aplicando. Muchas gracias)
Technical SEO | | online_admiral0 -
Canonical tags pointing at old URLs that have been 301'd
I have a site which has various white label sites with the same content on each. I have canonical tags on the white label sites pointing to the main site. I have changed some URLs on the main site and 301'd the previous URL to the new ones. Is it ok to have the canonicals pointing to the old URLs that now have a 301 redirect on them.
Technical SEO | | BeattieGroup0 -
Would you shorten this url, and if so how?
I designed the structure of my website way before I even thought about SEO. I run a website that requires me to categorize articles is somewhat deep nested categories so an example url would be as follows http://www.yakangler.com/articles/news/new-products/boats/item/1442-jackson-kayak-launches-the-big-tuna Would you shorten the url to somethign like this? http://www.yakangler.com/a/n/np/b/item/1442-jackson-kayak-launches-the-big-tuna If so how would you manage the redirects I'm unsure how to add a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file that wouldn't require me to add one for every single article. Could I do it with a rule that recognizes only the middle part of the url and redirect it accordingly? Thanks for any advice you might have!
Technical SEO | | mr_w0 -
Can I format my H1 to be smaller than H2's and H3's on the same page?
I would like to create a web design with 12px H1 and for sub headings on the page to be more like 24px. Will search engines see this and dislike it? The reason for doing it is that I want to put a generic page title in the banner, and more poetic headings above the main body. Example: Small H1: Wholesale coffee, online coffee shop and London roastery Large h2: Respect the bean... Thanks
Technical SEO | | Crumpled_Dog
Scott0 -
Does removing product listings help raise SERP's on other pages?
Does removing content ever make sense? We have out of stock products that are left on the site (in an out of stock section) specifically for SEO value, but I am not sure how to approach the problem from a bottom line conversion stand point. Do we leave out of stock products and hope that they turn into a conversion rate via cross selling, or do out of stock products lower the value of other pages by "stealing" link juice and pagerank from the rest of the site? (and effectively driving interest away) What is your perspective? Do you believe that any content that is related or semi-related to your main focus is beneficial, or does it only make sense to have strong content that has a higher rate of conversion and overall site engagement?
Technical SEO | | 13375auc30 -
Can someone break down 'page level link metrics' for me?
Sorry for the, again, basic question - can someone define page level link metrics for me?
Technical SEO | | Benj250 -
Issue with Joomla Site not showing in SERP's
Site: simpsonelectricnc dot com I'm working on a Joomla website for a local business that isn't ranking at all for any relevant keyword - including the business name. The site is only about six months old and has relatively few links. I realize it takes time to compete for even low-volume keywords, but I think something else may be preventing the site from showing up. The site is not blocked by Robots.txt (which includes a valid reference to the sitemap)
Technical SEO | | CGR-Creative
There is no duplicate content issue, the .htaccess is redirecting all non-www traffic to www version
Every page has a unique title and H1 tag.
The URL's are search-engine friendly (not dynamic either)
XML sitemap is live and submitted to Google WM Tools. Google shows that it is indexing about 70% of the submitted URL's. The site has essentially no domain authority (0.02) according to Moz - I'm assuming this is due to lack of links and short life on the web.
Until today, 98% of the pages had identical meta descriptions. Again, I realize six months is not an eternity - but the site will not even show up for "business name + city,state" searches in Google. In fact, the only way I've seen it in organic results is to search for the exact URL. I would greatly appreciate any help.0