What Is The Preferred Url Structure For Se’s?
-
Here is my issue, my domain is abcdomian.com and I’m trying to rank the site for the keyword “example”. All of my content is under “abcdomain.com/folder/example/” and building content off of “abcdomain.com/example” is not an option. So I’m thinking about moving the content to “abcdomain.com/online-example/” and 301ing the old pages . Of the two paths below, which will have a greater impact on my rankings for the term “example”?
Current: abcdomain.com/folder/example/
Proposed: abcdomain.com/online-example/Thoughts?
-
You question is a double edged sword and cuts both ways. There are both Pros and Cons to both the old and new URL structures. Hopefully my explanation helps.
The old structure allows you the chance to keyword focus the page more. For example lets say your keyword is tacos and you are wanting to rule the taco market. The old URL path allows you multiple pages with focused keywords to different long tail keywords. For example you could do tacoking.com/mexico/tacos and tacoking.com/peru/tacos and that type of structure would allow you to pass link juice from the sub page(tacos) to the category page(peru or mexico) and so one. The down side is you could effect the user experience with too many pages and cause a higher bounce rate. Also it sounds like the current platform you use isn't very flexible and might not let you make multiple "folders." If you do use this make sure to plan it out and make it a nice user experience.
On the other hand the new structure makes your website easier to maintain without a bunch of categories and sub-categories causing a vast improvement in the useability of your site. It makes it a lot easier to make multiple pages with custom URLs without researching the category it needs to fit under. It does cause you to keyword stuff your URL alot more than you currently have to.
I hope this gives you some perspective of the different options you have. It sounds like the system you are currently using is really constricted and it isn't allowing you to have the proper freedom to SEO you content how you see fit. There are a ton of open source platforms that you can build a site off of that allows you to do both styles of URLs.Keep in mind that 301 redirects don't pass 100% link juice to the new page it is pointing to and you still have to SEO the new URL you are focusing on. I hope that 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
-
Client wants to remove mobile URLs from their sitemap to avoid indexing issues. However this will require SEVERAL billing hours. Is having both mobile/desktop URLs in a sitemap really that detrimental to search indexing?
We had an enterprise client ask to remove mobile URLs from their sitemaps. For their website both desktop & mobile URLs are combined into one sitemap. Their website has a mobile template (not a responsive website) and is configured properly via Google's "separate URL" guidelines. Our client is referencing a statement made from John Mueller that having both mobile & desktop sitemaps can be problematic for indexing. Here is the article https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-sitemaps-20137.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
We would be happy to remove the mobile URLs from their sitemap. However this will unfortunately take several billing hours for our development team to implement and QA. This will end up costing our client a great deal of money when the task is completed. Is it worth it to remove the mobile URLs from their main website to be in adherence to John Mueller's advice? We don't believe these extra mobile URLs are harming their search indexing. However we can't find any sources to explain otherwise. Any advice would be appreciated. Thx.0 -
Going from 302 redirect to 301 redirect weeks after changing URL structure
I made a small change on an ecommerce site that had big impacts I didn't consider... About six weeks ago in an effort to clean up one of many SEO-related problems on an ecommerce site, I had a developer rewrite the URLs to replace underscores with hyphens and redirect all pages throughout the site to that page with the new URL structure. We didn't immediately update our sitemap to reflect the changes (bad!) and I just discovered all the redirects are 302s... Since these changes, most of the pages have a page authority of 1 and we have dropped several spots in organic search. If we were to setup 301 redirects for the pages that we changed the URL structure would there be any changes in organic search placement and page authority or is it too late?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116990439410 -
Can you nofollow a URL?
Hey Moz Community, My questions sounds pretty simple but unfortunately, it isn't. I have a domain name (we'll use example.com for this) http://example.com which 301 re-directs to http://www.example.com. http://example.com has bad links pointing to it and http://www.example.com does not. So essentially, I want to stop negative influences from http://example.com being passed on to http://www.example.com. A 302 re-direct sounds like it would work in theory but is this the best way to go about this? Just so you know, we have completed a reconsideration request a long time ago but I think the bad links are still negatively affecting the website as it does not rank for it's own name which is bizarre. Actual Question: How do I re-direct http://example.com to http://www.example.com without passing on the negative SEO attached to http://example.com? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RiceMedia0 -
Image URL Change Catastrophe
We have a site with over 3mm pages indexed, and an XML sitemap with over 12mm images (312k indexed at peak). Last week our traffic dropped off a cliff. The only major change we made to the site in that time period was adding a DNS record for all of our images that moved them from a SoftLayer Object Storage domain to a subdomain of our site. The old URLs still work, but we changed all the links from across our site to the new subdomain. The big mistake we made was that we didn't update our XML sitemap to the new URLs until almost a week after the switch (totally forgot that they were served from a process with a different config file). We believe this was the cause of the issue because: The pages that dropped in traffic were the ones where the images moved, while other pages stayed more or less the same. We have some sections of our property where the images are, and have always been, hosted by Amazon and their rankings didn't crater. Same with pages that do not have images in the XML sitemap (like list pages). There wasn't a change in geographic breakdown of our traffic, which we looked at because the timing was around the same time as Pigeon. There were no warnings or messages in Webmaster Tools, to indicate a manual action around something unrelated. The number of images indexed in our sitemap according Webmaster Tools dropped from 312k to 10k over the past week. The gap between the change and the drop was 5 days. It takes Google >10 to crawl our entire site, so the timing seems plausible. Of course, it could be something totally unrelated and just coincidence, but we can't come up with any other plausible theory that makes sense given the timing and pages affected. The XML sitemap was updated last Thursday, and we resubmitted it to Google, but still no real change. Anyone had a similar experience? Any way to expedite the climb back to normal traffic levels? Screen%20Shot%202014-07-29%20at%203.38.34%20PM.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wantering0 -
Brackets vs Encoded URLs: The "Same" in Google's eyes, or dup content?
Hello, This is the first time I've asked a question here, but I would really appreciate the advice of the community - thank you, thank you! Scenario: Internal linking is pointing to two different versions of a URL, one with brackets [] and the other version with the brackets encoded as %5B%5D Version 1: http://www.site.com/test?hello**[]=all&howdy[]=all&ciao[]=all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile
Version 2: http://www.site.com/test?hello%5B%5D**=all&howdy**%5B%5D**=all&ciao**%5B%5D**=all Question: Will search engines view these as duplicate content? Technically there is a difference in characters, but it's only because one version encodes the brackets, and the other does not (See: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp) We are asking the developer to encode ALL URLs because this seems cleaner but they are telling us that Google will see zero difference. We aren't sure if this is true, since engines can get so _hung up on even one single difference in character. _ We don't want to unnecessarily fracture the internal link structure of the site, so again - any feedback is welcome, thank you. 🙂0 -
URL with a # but no ! being indexed
Given that it contains a #, how come Google is able to index this URL?: http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home It was my understanding that Google can't handle # properly unless it's paired with a ! (hash fragment / bang). site:http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home returns nothing, but: site:http://www.rtl.nl/xl returns http://www.rtl.nl/xl/#/home in the result set
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdelmanDigital0 -
Is this structure valid for a canonical tag?
Working on a site, and noticed their canonical tags follow the structure: //www.domain.com/article They cited their reason for this as http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt. Does anyone know if Google will recognize this as a valid canonical? Are there any issues with using this as a the canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Most effective Title Tag Structure
I want to target a set of keywords but I want to know which type of Title tag structure or wording is most effective? Here are my target keywords: CMMS, CMMS Software, EAM Software, Maintenance Management Software Do you think using exact keywords terms are most effective? For example: Title tag: CMMS, CMMS Software, EAM Software, Maintenance Management Software Or: Title tag: CMMS Software, EAM Maintenance Management Software Same goes for keyword use for content and H1 tags. Your thoughts? Thanks, John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VizionSEO990