What to do when a Bad URL has to stay?
-
I am working with a friend on optimizing a site that has a troublesome set of issues.
The company has integrated some ERP system that cannot be changed or removed and it is creating goofy URL's. So my question is which URL do I build links to? the www.xxx.com or the crazy URL that it is being redirected to.
Site URL: www.nauticalchartsonline.com
redirect: http://www.nauticalchartsonline.com/n.c/NauticalChartsOnline.htmlI would greatly appreciate constructive feedback.. Thanks, Jeannie
-
I agree with James here. Especially if you have anchor text in the link, people aren't going to see that URL as much. While it's not the best URL, I've certainly seen worse.
Do you have any update you can give us with any interesting lessons learned or things that you did?
-
Send links to the new (ugly) URL. Consistency is critical, all links to the same content must use the same URL. The actual URL is less important; more a "would be nice" rather than a "must have"
-
Moldy, they will not allow me to change URL structure and know SEO will be limited. We are going to go ahead. Your answer was really helpful.
-
Can't you just do a quick .htaccess url rewrite to remove the /n.c?
If you want the links to have more value sending them to the actual /n.c/ directory would be better (as long as there is no plan to change the url stucture in future.)
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
-
Does social media presence + inbound links outweigh bad SEO?
Some of our competitors have SEO errors in the thousands, yet rank much higher than us for keywords that we're targeting. The SEO errors are duplicate content, titles, and 404 errors. We've successfully nailed down much of our SEO issues to a bare minimum, although not eliminated them completely, so we're at a loss as to why we aren't gaining much ground. From what we can tell, the difference between us and them is they have a large amount of inbound links to their site plus popular social media presence. Can it be inferred from this that an active social media presence and large inbound link count outweigh bad SEO practices? What else should we be looking for to help pinpoint why we're not gaining rank with the keywords we're targeting?
Link Building | | Closetstogo0 -
Is there any BAD SEO implications to acquiring backlinks from customers?
What would be the negative aspects to sending customer's requests for a backlink in conjunction with asking how their experience with us was? Backlinks are one of the toughest for our niche industry to acquire and this seems like one of the best angles to cover, since we have .edu , .mil , .gov , and many bigname companies making purchases from us. Would if be wrong to offer a small 5% discount during their next purchase if they create a backlink with us? Or if we added a " Customer's we've served " section including their logo or text link? Thank you! I hope you're all having an awesome day / week / month!
Link Building | | Deacyde1 -
Linkbuild on 'new' or 'old' url?
Hi, I'm trying to rank for a keyword. For the last year and 4 months the rank hasn't changed much. It stays on the 3th page. Within this period the rank has first gone down and then up. Three months ago I started doing linkbuilding for the url the keyword was linked to. This is a main category page. Lately, I don't know when exactly I've discovered that the keyword is ranking for a different url, a product category of these items for 1 brand. I'm wondering if it's wise to shift my focus and start using the 'new' url for linkbuilding? The 'old' url isn't in the top 100 for the keyword. However, if you search for the url in Google, it shows up. And, if I'm advised to shift my focus to the 'new' url, is it advisable to go back and change the backlinks to the 'new' url? A question related to the above one, is there another tool like Open Site Explorer which shows you an overview of the backlinks directing to a deeplink? Like MajestickSEO. I'm trying to get the most extensive overview possible. Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | anubis20 -
Domain name holding pages link back, good or bad?
We are a web design and hosting company http://www.spiralsites.com But when we register domains for clients, or they take email only or a name is parked we have it using a holding page which can be seen as follows: http://www.jcevents.co.uk/ is this a good thing? Bad thing? Could it would it should it benefit our rankings? Should we do more to make it look less like our main site and actually try to use it better to help rank our other services pages?
Link Building | | spiralsites0 -
Recovery from Penguin removing internal urls permanently replace with new
Since I was hit with Penguin back in April, but with this last update Oct. 5th I did see a very slight recovery, I was thinking about dumping some of my old URL's which contain backlinks which I can't get removed that seem spammy. I was thinking of keeping the page intact but replace with an entirely new URL and NOT 301 redirect. So basically starting over with that URL that way the backlinks points to a dead url. Any thoughts?
Link Building | | cbielich0 -
Good and Bad of Comment Hut?
Hi All, A new client in a competitive market (international car hire - Car Trawler affiliate) is using Comment Hut to gain links to his site. I have not used this service so am wondering, with the latest google stuff, what the good the bad and the ugly is on the comment hut service. Does it work? Should we avoid it? Thanks in advance Steve
Link Building | | stevecounsell0 -
When good domain names go bad
We have created a website to distribute a niche product. About a year ago, another vendor decided to drop the product and did not renew their domain name. We tried to acquire the domain name, but a cyber squatter picked it up. The old domain name had a few decent back links, and there was probably some value to us with a 301, but the cyber squatter was asking $8,000 and we didn't even bother countering such an absurd figure. The old domain continued to rank reasonably well for one or our search terms, even though it was just one page of spammy links. Well, this week it appears that Google Panda may have finally killed it off. Which brings me to a couple of questions. 1. In addition to a simple Google search, is there a way to determine if Google has killed a domain? 2. Assuming that Google has indeed killed the domain, is there any value in trying to 301 the domain should it ever be released? Best,
Link Building | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Marketing URLs - best practices
Hi, We do have a consistent url structure like http://www.company.com/productname-london
Link Building | | ecnic
http://www.company.com/productname-auckland
etc. Now marketing wants to include each URL in our yearly printed catalogue.
Out of marketing reasons (I agree with that), they think the URLs are too long and should be for example: http://www.company/london
http://www.company/auckland
etc. Our brochure is very important for direct customers and we have a target group that actively uses the internet and social media and therefore will pick up these links. Even if we do correct redirects in the background - couldn't we have the problem
that we have a double set of urls? What do you think about that?0