URL, Breadcrumb/Site Hierarchy Display, User (and Bot) Expectations
-
TL;DR: Do parts of URLs that are used throughout the web quite consistently have any influence on robots (or users)? Are there any studies? What would you use for pages that are something between a tag-page and a wiki-like article?
Long version:
On a site with a lot of content, I decided to go for tags to present articles on that topic together. My first thought was to simply list those under the URL /tag/{Tag_Name}. Short. Simple. Grabs the core meaning - on this page you'll find stuff about the tag.
But: those tag-pages will be more than just lists of the tagged pages (let's say they are articles on various topics and products with certain attributes and the same tag can apply to a product and an article). The tag pages themselves will often talk a lot about the use of said tag - extensively, without blabbering. It is aimed at being a landing page and hub for the tag/keyword. Having this in mind, I pondered using /wiki/. It does fit in some respects, but it really is not a wiki. /info/, /lexicon/, /knowledge/ and other ideas came to mind but the more I thought the weirder I did find most ideas.
What I am now wondering:
-
Do these parts of URLs (/tag/, or /product/, or /wiki/) that are not really keywords in most cases have any influence on search engines? They are used quite consistently across the web and therefore could be used as signals. I suspect, though, that they might have more influence on shaping user expectation. (If I see /wiki/ in an URL or site hierarchy display (breadcrumb), I expect ... well, a wiki-style page; if I see /tag/ I expect a collection of stuff with that tag.)
-
What would you chose if it is not quite a tag, nor quite a wiki but something in-between? Or do you think it does not matter at all? (Breadcrumbs will be used and google has used them for display in just about all SERPs.)
-
Are there perchance any studies concerning these parts of URLS?
Regards
Nico
-
-
Thanks for your thoughts! That surely is some stuff worth thinking about - and reminding me that many people are a lot less familiar with online vocabulary than us her.
In the current case it does not really solve the problem due to it being a bit of a mixture of things like /motifs/ /themes/ /objects/ /characters/ /topoi/ etc. as they appear in a certain kind of literature.... but I really do not want to use multiple URLs for that. I might end up settling for /info/ as catch-all - and give it a more meaningful breadcrumb probably.
Regards
Nico
-
I am not aware of any studies showing impact of what you call "not really keywords". Even if there were, I would ignore them as you have to ask, "Do these words mean anything to your users?" I work in some verticals where when you use a term like "wiki" or "faq" people think I am either talking about some type of weaved basket or I just said they were overweight, respectively. I think it is good to start from a common lexicon, with words like "wiki" etc, but you still have to ask that initial question.
We went through this exercise about 2 years ago on a site as we wanted to setup an evergreen section for the top 40 keyword concepts. Each concept would have a single page that would contain an original article that was at least 1,000 words long, custom videos, images, etc.
We asked a similar question. Should we call the section (and folder in the URL) "wiki", or "encyclopedia" or "info", etc? We did not want to call it a "wiki" as we had experts editing and writing and it was not open to the public to edit, even though for the sake of organization and layout, it looked like a wiki and provided information like one. This is when we found out that our users were generally not as familiar with wikis and the comment with the weaved basket came out.
We did some keyword research and found that the word "help" made sense to users and also with the way Google looked at our topics when you used help in conjunction with the key terms we were trying to rank for. So we ended up using a URL that was domain.com/help/keyword-topic-of-article-slug.html It has worked pretty well for us and the traffic has followed. We have our daily blog content and ecommerce sections in separate folder. Makes it easy with GA and Search Console as we can look at each section easily and determine what is going on. This was key when we had some issues with organic traffic as once we noticed overall traffic changes, we drilled down into the sections, found the issues and fixed.
TL;DR - Find out what words make sense to your users and use those, ideally they would also be keywords that you are trying to rank for. After than, just follow best practices for URL guidelines.
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
-
Should I change my website urls?
We're translating our website in a few languages (FR / DE / JP) using subdirectories. So our website will have the following urls www.brand.com/en
On-Page Optimization | | dcalexandra
www.brand.com/fr
www.brand.com/de
www.brand.com/jp I would like to change the url structure of a few pages from www.brand.com/section/feature-name to www.brand.com/feature-name Is it a good idea to do this now since we're adding the subfolders and these are anyway new urls in google's eyes?0 -
Translated the site but traffic is not coming
Hi, We've build a lawyer directory website (www.iranianlawyers.com) which already has good Google rankings for related terms (Ex. Iranian lawyers, Iranian lawyers california, etc). About 1.5 months ago we translated the site to Farsi and published it online: www.iranianlawyers.com/farsi However we have yet to see any new traffic generated from those pages. The website has a decent back-link profile and there are no almost no competitors in our space with translated pages. Would someone please take a look at our translated pages and let me know if there are any major on-site issues that you see that we need to address? I've checked for noindex or nofollow tags but they dont seem to be an issue. Not sure if I'm missing something here. Thank you very much
On-Page Optimization | | Heydarian0 -
Help finding someone to handle crashing site/site optimization.
I need someone who can handle website/WordPress issues as they come up.For example, my site has gone down 4 times tonight, and my host can't figure it out. They also keep recommending that I optimize my site, but I don't know how. I need a go-to web person for this sort of thing. Any recommendations?
On-Page Optimization | | cbrant7770 -
On Site Errors
HI Folks I'm monitoring a small Australian site bluetea.com.au . Currently I have a SEO specialist who does month onsite maintenance work for this site. However each month I continue to see errors in webmaster tools... as an example, currently webmaster tools suggest we have 21 short meta dic and 26 duplicate title tags..... Examples given are Short Meta Discp /cleaning-products-and-our-health/toxic-cleaners/ /colour-consultant/fushia-door/ /portfolio/parisian-apartment-black-kitchen/parisian-apartment-black-kitchen/ Duplicate title tags <a id="zip_0-anchor" class="zippedsection_title"></a>concrete-kitchen | Blue Tea Kitchen Designs
On-Page Optimization | | PHD/kitchen-trends-and-material-innovation/concrete-kitchen-2/
/kitchen-trends-for-2013/concrete-kitchen/<a id="zip_1-anchor" class="zippedsection_title"></a>Potts Point Kitchen | Blue Tea Kitchen Designs
/portfolio/potts-point-kitchen/
/portfolio/potts-point-kitchen/pott-point-kitchen/My SEO tells me that he has solved all these issues but after one or two months they still remain in webmaster tools... can anybody help me understand why?Thank you
0 -
Better to hyphenate URL or no?
Sea Glass Jewelry or Sea-Glass-Jewelry My domain name does not have my keyword in it, so I have been using the category as a means to get the keyword in the URL. My site would say www.abcdefghijk.com/sea-glass-jewelry/sterling-starfish-necklace When I run the review, it tells me that I have too many parameters. Is it too long? Should I remove hyphens? Which is better?
On-Page Optimization | | tiffany11030 -
Question Regarding Site Structure
I have a quick question regarding site structure that I hope some of you guys could share your opinion on. I watched a white board friday from Rand a little while back where he explains that you need to try and make the site structure as flat as possible. He was saying try having no more that 3 links from the home page to get to the desired location. My question is this. I am looking at a site that has a pretty complex structure that I am trying to clear up as much as possible without making any of there rankings suffer. So they have www.domian.com/general-category/district/town/ and sometimes www.domian.com/general-category/district/town/item-specifics Now i know it is not good as it is, but they are dubious about changing too much as they have some serious traffic coming to the site. But, my question is that all the pages can be found from the home page through the menus/sub-menus. But do these count as a direct link from the home page. Also a problem is that because of this mozbot has detected that there are too many links from the home page and suggested that it should be below 200. But should I make these menu links no index or no follow. Obviously, by doing this, if the link does count as direct from the home page it wont after doing this. Thanks Jenson
On-Page Optimization | | jensonseo0 -
Site structure question
I'm currently working on a very awkward custom-WP setup, in which I can't maintain the present drop-down navigation menu without having those pages under a parent or without completely recoding everything. I have two requirements, for SEO purposes I'm looking for the following structure for each targeted landing page: www.example.com/landing-page as opposed to www.example.com/sub/landing-page Of course, having my landing pages as a child, I get the latter of the two. For navigational purposes they need to fall under a specific category in a drop-down menu. With any other theme or setup this is an easy fix, but not here. What I have now is that the landing pages are currently placed under a parent category page. But, they have custom permalinks. The permalinks are setup as follows www.example.com/landing-page But, technically the exact structure is still www.example.com/sub/landing-page which then redirects to the custom permalink. So, my question is - in an attempt to get my most important landing pages close to the root for better PR and crawlability, do I still get the same benefit with my current setup? Is this structure I have, better, worse, or indifferent? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | JayAdams320 -
® is displaying as o in the SERP pages
Hello All, A client's site was recently redesigned and since the redesign the ® is not displaying as such in the search engines when created using Option+R on a Mac. If it is created using ® it works fine. I suspect it has something to do with the programming or the CMS. Other sites on this CMS seem to not have this problem from what I have seen so far. http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cliff+stevenson#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=cliff stevenson calgary realtor&aq=0&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=23c2bd992ac36d9d&pf=p&pdl=3000 As more time goes on, title tags and descriptions that are months or years old are also digressing to the 0. I have cued up a few tests and once crawled will have narrowed down whether it is a CMS issue or not. Won't have completely done so, but much closer. The CMS says they have made no changes that would have caused this. The programming gang on my end says they did nothing different on this site then on others so it can't be on us. The classic 'no way it can by us, it has to be them' from all angles. I am stuck in the middle trying to find the solution. Has anyone else ever come across this problem? Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | kyegrace0