Hierarchy and consistency in ecommerce URLs
-
One of the first things I remember reading about SEO and URLs, a long time ago, is that keywords are important, and hierarchy is important, for search engines and for users. Hierarchy in URLs would give the search engines an idea of the structure of the site, and users would be able to edit the URLs to continue navigating.
I'm wondering about URLs, hierarchy and usability lately, since I've seen that ASOS uses a new URL structure on their site. At first glance, I thought it was brilliant, so I would like to get all of your opinions as well.
For those of you that haven't seen the URLs: for categories, ASOS uses a structure as you would expect it, but for products they don't insert the category in the URL. Instead they insert the brand name as the first part of the URL, followed by the product title. Some examples:
Category:
www.asos.com/women/dresses/...Product:
www.asos.com/french-connection/french-connection-tie-waist-pocket-stripe-dress/...I can see the importance of brand name for a site like ASOS, and like how they stressed this by inserting not the category but the brand for products. I don't know how much ASOS still relies on organic non-ASOS related keyword traffic, but still.
Now, for hierarchy, I guess a good internal linking structure will tell the search engines about the hierarchy of a site as well, right? So perhaps hierarchy in the URL isn't that important? Perhaps something like this would be just as good as anything, given a good internal link structure?
www.onlinestore.com/category/
www.onlinestore.com/subcategory/
www.onlinestore.com/brand/product-title/Now, I understand that if you use this structure, you wouldn't be able to have men/shirts and women/shirts, but let's say that you don't have subcategories that use the same names. In this case, how important is hierarchy?
And, what do you think about this URL structure for an ecommerce site for which brands are important?
-
Indeed John, using men-shirts would certainly be an option as a solution to the double names. If I understand you correctly, this would result in something like this:
www.onlinestore.com/men/
www.onlinestore.com/men-shirts/
www.onlinestore.com/men-denim-shirts/
www.onlinestore.com/levis/levis-stone-wash-denim-shirt/So I wonder if a flat URL structure, supported by proper internal linking of course, could be a viable option, or could perhaps even the prefered option?
Michel
-
Interesting insights for sure - here are some additional thoughts:
- Taking a quick look at the source, perhaps the engines may see this as a logical grouping, though it would certainly be more beneficial for more linkage back to the brand page from the product page.
- You mentioned not having men/shirts or women/shirts with this structure. What about having men-shirts/ or women-shirts/ ?
When there are multiple layers of links, as in an ecommerce site, it's a good practice to strongly support each linking level, with pages pointing back to their parents.
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 Keywords
I am doing SEO on our eCommerce website and read that I should include keywords in the URL The original URL is: http://thegiftlinks.com/personalized-wedding-glass.html
On-Page Optimization | | abdulw
Title page: Wedding gift Dubai - Anniversary gift Dubai - Personalized Wedding Glass
Meta Data:
Wedding gift Dubai - Anniversary gift Dubai - Personalized Wedding Glass
It is great for a wedding gift and anniversary gift for friends and family members. If I will include the keyword to the url it will be like this
http://thegiftlinks.com/personalized-wedding-glass.html/Wedding-gift-Dubai is this the correct way to include keywords in the URL? Thanks0 -
Are the prepositions and separate letters in URL bad for website optimization?
Is it ok for website optimization to use prepositions and separate letters in URL ? Examples: -i-series ; -salad-with-avocado etc.
On-Page Optimization | | adrecom0 -
2 Question about URL structure
Hello guys 1 - I have a question about the best structure for URLs from the point of view of SEO: Is it OK to use the URL as mywebsite.com.br/long-tail-article Or is better this mywebsite.com.br/category/long-tail-article 2 - When part of my keyword is already in my "category", for example: mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-is-good I leave it as it is, or in the following way: mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing-is-good NOTE: Do not take into account that this URL would be different from other URLs in this category
On-Page Optimization | | seomasterbrasil0 -
Moving our current homepage to a new URL
Our homepage currently speaks to a specific product and we're re-doing our homepage to be more about the brand which links to the product. The current home page has PA of 62 with thousands of links to the page. Question is are there any best practices around this or any risks? So current page is: www.xyz.com which we will be refreshing then moving the existing content to www.xyz.com/product so all the subdirectories gets shifted over 1 Thank in advance for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | JoeLin0 -
Duplicate Content- Best Practise Usage of the canonical url
Canonical urls stop self competition - from duplicate content. So instead of a 2 pages with a rank of 5 out of 10, it is one page with a rank of 7 out of 10.
On-Page Optimization | | WMA
However what disadvantages come from using canonical urls. For example am I excluding some products like green widet, blue widget. I have a customer with 2 e-commerce websites(selling different manufacturers of a type jewellery). Both websites have massive duplicate content issues.
It is a hosted CMS system with very little SEO functionality, no plugins etc. The crawling report- comes back with 1000 of pages that are duplicates. It seems that almost every page on the website has a duplicate partner or more. The problem starts in that they have 2 categorys for each product type, instead of one category for each product type.
A wholesale category and a small pack category. So I have considered using a canonical url or de-optimizing the small pack category as I believe it receives less traffic than the whole category. On the original website I tried de- optimizing one of the pages that gets less traffic. I did this by changing the order of the meta title(keyword at the back, not front- by using small to start of with). I also removed content from the page. This helped a bit. Or I was thinking about just using a canonical url on the page that gets less traffic.
However what are the implications of this? What happens if some one searches for "small packs" of the product- will this no longer be indexed as a page. The next problem I have is the other 1000s of pages that are showing as duplicates. These are all the different products within the categories. The CMS does not have a front office that allows for canonical urls to be inserted. Instead it would have to be done going into the html of the pages. This would take ages. Another issue is that these product pages are not actually duplicate, but I think it is because they have such little content- that the rodger(seo moz crawler, and probably googles one too) cant tell the difference.
Also even if I did use the canonical url - what happened if people searched for the product by attributes(the variations of each product type)- like blue widget, black widget, brown widget. Would these all be excluded from Googles index.
On the one hand I want to get rid of the duplicate content, but I also want to have these pages included in the search. Perhaps I am taking too idealistic approach- trying to optimize a website for too many keywords. Should I just focus on the category keywords, and forget about product variations. Perhaps I look into Google Analytics, to determine the top landing pages, and which ones should be applied with a canonical. Also this website(hosted CMS) seems to have more duplicate content issues than I have seen with other e-commerce sites that I have applied SEO MOZ to On final related question. The first website has 2 landing pages- I think this is a techical issue. For example www.test.com and www.test.com/index. I realise I should use a canonical url on the page that gets less traffic. How do I determine this? (or should I just use the SEO MOZ Page rank tool?)0 -
Best URL Structure For Products That Are The Same
I know that the url structure is very important for seo preferably using the keyword. But is it okay to have the same url with the product number at the end ? Each of our products have a name with a product number. Or will this cause to many similar urls? or if the folder is the name of the product that needs to be optimized, can the page just be called the product number? Example: Say you have a 20 different product lines and they are all catagorized in the appropriate folders, and need to be optimized for the actual product name. XXX (folder name ) WWW-PR-123 WWW-PR-1234 WWW-PR-12345 WWW-PR-123456 what would be the best url structure? Can they have the same begining? The product name? something like: www.example.com/xxx/www-pr-123.php www.example.com/xxx/www-pr-1234.php or www.example.com/xxx/pr-123.php www.example.com/xxx/pr-1234.php
On-Page Optimization | | hfranz0 -
Absolute vs Relative URLs
What are the pros and cons of these two types of URLs and what type of weight does this hold. It doesn't seem to be a big issue in regards to ranking. Any qualified clarity would help.
On-Page Optimization | | Romancing0 -
Home Page is Not Ranking Anymore on this ecommerce site
Hi Everyone, I work regularly on this site www.cheapsnapframes.co.uk which is a cubecart based site and upto a few months ago the home page used to rank on poster frames we were on page 1 of google now we are on page 2 but it has dropped the home page and favours a category page. I have been looking at this to try and figure out why and I have today realised I had some external links on the home page pointing to the .com which the site used to run from but has been setup as a 301 redirect so I have changed these to internal links. I have used the on page tool and get an A but its been showing an A for a long time. Is there any other reason why we have lost out on this keyword term? Thank you in advance Tracy
On-Page Optimization | | dashesndots0