URL Construction
-
Working on an old site that currently has category urls (that productively rank) like this example:
LakeNameBoating.com/category/705687/rentals
I want to enhance the existing mid page one rank for terms related to "Lake Name Boat Rentals," 301ing the old urls to the new, would you construct the new urls as:
LakeNameBoating.com/lake-name-boat-rentals
or...
LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals
And why? It's all for one particular lake with "name" being just an anonymous placeholder example.
Thanks!
-
Awesome! Glad to hear it!
-
Here's an update. Went with LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals. It all worked out great. Thank you all for the help.
-
In our experience the keywords in the URL do play (but pales in comparison to other on page signals). If you have multiple iterations of these sites, why not do some A/B testings to see what woks best.
Acknowledging what the previous posters are saying but if you are going to leverage this, do a little key word research and find out what the predicted searches look like. We do find that order can make a difference, i.e. Lake Tahoe Boat Rental vs Boat Rental Lake Tahoe. Maybe play with the inverted order of the title tags as a contrast.
Again, other signals are much more important but all things being equal we have seen positive movements with keywords in the URL.
-
Fair enough! You're definitely not wrong—the structure you're proposing is absolutely better than the one you're currently using. Whether it's worth it to change things now is up to you. As long as you're aware of the risk and you're confident that it's worth it, I say go for it.
-
Okay, well, thanks guys. I kind of thought you'd feel a little stronger about the value of changing urls. Especially since Moz has tools that grade lower for janky urls. My own experience is a messed-up url is not a positive and well worth the slight/temporary decrease in page authority while that gets sorted out.
Anyhoo, thanks again!
-
To be honest, I tend to agree with Logan when it comes to changing URLs. That said, if you're fairly sure that simplifying your URLs would help, I'd go with the second option.
-
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the message.
Would you go with new urls when the old urls are so bad...
-
If you're sure you want to use a new URL, I'd go with the second one (LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals). The name of the lake being in the domain would make using it again feel redundant.
That's pretty much just personal preference, though.
-
Hi Logan,
Thanks for the response. I don't know, I've had a lot of success cleaning up non-search friendly urls like this.
In regards to the link above, Google saying "don't bother" may not be the whole story. But thank you for your take on it.
Finally, a cleaner/more purposeful url would have better CTR.
Anyone else?
-
Hi,
I never recommend URL changes for the purpose of improving rankings. While URL structure is a ranking factor, it's not a big enough one to justify restructuring your URLs for. See this article for more on how insignificant this is as a ranking signal.
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
-
Mystery URLs showing in Analytics - All 404s
Hi Guys So we have a whole load of mystery urls showing in analytics .The urls are completely not relevant and have somehow been created However - when you click on the URLs - they all go to 404 pages - pages not found. The website is a travel website but is showing pages like /overcome-fatigue-during-mesothelioma-treatment/ in analytics. Webmaster is not showing any of these pages - but analytics is showing traffic for them??? My initial thought was that it was a spam URL injection - but they are not pages. They don't exist Our database is fine, WP admin seems fine - none of these supposed pages have been created on WP - so why are they showing on analytics as having driven traffic??? None of the urls are indexed on Google. Its a mystery!!!! Can anyone help? Has anyone seen this before????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
URL Too Long vs. 301 Redirect
We have a small number of content pages where the urls paths were setup before we started looking really hard at SEO. The paths are longer than recommended (but not super crazy IMHO) and some of the pages get a decent amount of traffic. Moz suggests updating the URLs to make them shorter but I wonder if anyone has experience with the tradeoffs here. Is it better to mark those issues to be ignored and just use good URLs going forward or would you suggest updating the URLs to something shorter and implementing a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | russell_ms0 -
Does the url in for your homepage impact SEO
Is there any harm to SEO having a homepage url that is not clean like www.domain.com. For example citi uses https://online.citi.com/US/login.do Does that matter in any way? Would a company like citi benefit from changing to www.citi.com as their homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kcb81781 -
Where is the best location for my primary keyword in my URL?
http://moz.com/learn/seo/url says: http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword.html However I am wondering about structuring things this a little backwards from that: http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/ (this would be an introduction and overview of the topic described by the primary keyword)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo
http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/secondary/ (this would be a category landing page with snippets from articles within the niche described by the secondary keyword, which is itself a niche of the primary keyword)
http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/secondary/article-title/ (in-depth article on a topic within the scope of the secondary, which is within the scope of the primary) Where http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/ is the most important page targeting the most important URL. Thoughts?0 -
URL tracking on offline material
Hi there, Hope someone can give some advice. We are doing some magazine advertising, the main purpose of the advert is to promote one of our new products, however the URL goes something like this: http://www.domain.com/products/new-product-libra-furniture/ which is just too long for anyone to remember, I think it should be simply domain.com/libra which redirects to the product page, however how can I track this in Google Analytics? if using a 301 that's impossible? Any advice would be grateful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Optimal URLs for SEO and UX
We are considering restructuring the URL scheme on one of the websites we maintain. We have a few options. Currently news article URLs are as follows:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
http://domain.com/news/1234/article-title-name/ Download section URLs are as follows:
http://domain.com/downloads/files/1234/file-title-of-download-here/ Forum URLS:
http://forum.domain.com/forum/topic/1234/title-of-forum-topic-here/ We feel that these are a bit too long for both SEO and user experience. We want to remove as many directories from the URLs as possible. From experience, what do you recommend changing for the example URLs above? We have some ideas below...and we need to keep the ID in the URLs...however I know this is a little frustrating. Some ideas we have for news articles:
http://domain.com/news/article-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/article-title-shorter-n1234 Some ideas for the download pages:
http://domain.com/downloads/file-title-shorter-d1234
http://domain.com/downloads/files/file-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/file-title-shorter-d1234 Some ideas for the forum URLs:
http://forum.domain.com/topic-title-shorter-t1234
http://forum.domain.com/topic/topic-title-shorter-1234 What do you think of these suggestions? Any other URL ideas? Recommended URL length? The purpose of is question was to find the perfect URLs for the site we are working on; your thoughts, suggestions and tips are very much appreciated.0 -
URL formating is it worth changing?
One of my clients sites has almost OK URL's, set up something like the following: keyword2_keyword3_keyword1 Ideally the URL's would be more like this: keyword1-keyword2-keyword3 My question is is there any point in changing them and 301 redirecting them over just to get the target keywords in a better order and change the _ to a - ? Has anyone tried this and its worked or not worked, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Justin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrouchyKids0 -
Rel=Canonical URLs?
If I had two pages: PageA about Cats PageB about Dogs If PageA had a link rel=canonical to PageB, but the content is different, how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?" If PageA 301 redirected to PageB, (no content in PageA since it's 301 redirected), how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | visionnexus0