Search engine friendly URLs
-
I'm going to create some new content for my site, I'm trying to decide on the best search engine friendly format. Namely, is it ok to use a subdirectory or should I keep all content on root level?
Is the SEO effect of either of these URLs superior to the other?
-
I like this analysis and recommendation.
The only other thing I would say (if it's a page) is drop the trailing slash on the recommended URL to this:
domain.com/cooking/lasagnaThat makes it clear it's a page as opposed to a directory, and it also looks cleaner to the human eye.
Here's some more complete discussion on the trailing slash topic:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html -
Hi Limens,
It is certainly fine to use a subdirectory, and can really make sense to help organize your content. It's also helpful in your analytics if you want to see who went to the blog area of your site versus the product area of your site.
It would help to know a little more about your site, but I would choose neither of the above. I'd actually go with something like domain.com/cooking/lasagna/. Note that I'm not including the .php. If you later switch to a different language, you won't have to redirect from php to asp or html, etc.
I wouldn't stuff your subfolder in your URL with keywords like the tasty-food in your example below. It just makes your URL longer and look a little more spammy to the human eye.
-
The second one is the best, because sort URLs are more relevant than long ones, but the best practices are http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/url
Use - instead of _ to separate keywords
-
this is what the length of URL would be in reality:
www.domaindom.com/cooking-tasty-food/lasagna_with_cheese.php
but if there is a good SEO reason, I could just put it on the root:
-
If your URLs are sort, the best way is to use domain.com/cooking/lasagna.php, this is the best way to optimize for lasagna and target secondary keywords cooking related.
Bye.
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
-
URL Structure on Category Pages
Hi, Currently, we having the following URL Structure o our product pages: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/283/All_Products.html Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/4/Clothing.html Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/product/LOAD-HE-WOM/Assorted-High-End-Women-Clothing-Lots.html?cid=4 Since we are going to use another frontend system, we are thinking about re-working on this URL Structure, using something like this: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/ Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/product-title/ I understand this is better for SEO and user experience. However, we already have good traffic on the current URL Structure. Should we use same left-side filters on Category Pages as in All Products Page? Since we are using Faceted Navigation, when users filter the Category (e.g. Clothing) they will see same page as Clothing Category Page. Is that an issue for Duplicate Content? Since we are a wholesale company - I understand is using "/wholesale/products/" in URL for all product pages a good idea? If so, should we avoid word "wholesale" in product-title to avoid repeated word in URL? For us, SKU in URL helps the company employees and maybe some clients identify the link. However, what do you think of using the SEO-friendly product-title, and 301 redirect it to www.viatrading.com/BRTA-LN-DISHRACKS/, so 1st link is only used by company members and Canonicalized 2nd is the only one seen by general public? Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | viatrading10 -
Google search result dramatically dropped with drop in DA.
It looks like on 11/13 by site traffic dropped by like 75% and it just happens to coincide with the MOZ DA dropping to. Anyone else see this?
On-Page Optimization | | Motom70 -
Removing old URLs from Google
We rebuilt a site about a year ago on a new platform however Google is still indexing URL's from the old site that we have no control over. We had hoped that time would have 'cleaned' these out but they are still being flagged in HTML improvements in GWT. Is there anything we can do to effect these 'external' dropping out of the indexing given that they are still being picked up after a year.
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
URL Length
I know a URL should "technically" shorter than 75 characters. Does that include the http://www.domainname.com ? Thank you 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | Libra0130 -
Brand Name URL Redirecting to Actual URL
So we have already built a site under a parent company's URL: parentcompany.com And now we have their branded product lines in directories: parentcompany.com/brand-name1, and parentcompany.com/brand-name2 We also own the actual URL Brand Name 1 (which is also the exact description of the product): brandname1.com We do not yet own the URL for Brand Name 2 (which is also the exact description of the product): brandname2.com. This is because a squatter is sitting on it and is asking $10,000+ for it. What we are trying to determine is how valuable these brand name URLs are since they will be redirecting and not the actual site's primary domain name. Anybody know how much of an effect owning those and redirecting has on ranking for those brand names that are also very descriptive of the products? Would we be smarter to spend $10,000 on adwords or 10,000 on the domain? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | grayloon1 -
Close URL owned by competitors.
The following example is exactly analogous to our situation (site names slightly altered😞 We own www.business-skills.com. It's our main site. We don't own, and would rather avoid paying for, www.businessskills.com. It's a parked domain and the owners want a very large sum for it. We own www.business-skills.co.uk and point it to our main site. We don't own www.businessskills.co.uk. This is owned by our biggest competitor. We also own www.[ourbrand].com and .co.uk, and point them to the main site. My question is - how much traffic do you think we may be missing due to these nearly-but-not-quite URL matches? Does it matter in terms of lost revenue? What sort of things should I be looking at to get a very rough estimate?
On-Page Optimization | | JacobFunnell0 -
Navigation for search
We are getting ready to launch a site that has great navigation for users, but it is not so great for search engines. As long as we are ethical about it, does anyone see a downside to detecting a bot user agent and displaying different nav to it? I suppose some could consider it cloaking, but I noticed amazon uses this strategy and they don't seem to be getting a big penalty lol. We are not going to do anything shady with it, just offer the bot a different way to access our content. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | altecdesign0 -
Is it worth changing urls with underscores?
A few pages on one of my sites have underscores linking keywords rather than hyphens (keywords_and_keyword rather than keyword-and-keyword). Possibly from a time before I knew hyphens were preferred... One of the pages ranks well, and drives a good amount of traffic. The others do not do so well, but are still within the top 10 landing pages for the site. Is it worth me changing the underscores to hyphens (setting up 301 redirects first of course) or doesn't it make that much difference?
On-Page Optimization | | Jingo010