What happens to content under a category page that is not indexed?
-
We are reevaluating our URL structure. We have a flat architecture but would like to add subfolders per recommendations here and elsewhere. Some of our category pages are ad heavy/content light so we have them no indexed. We do have lots of quality content on the site that we would like to put under some of these keyword categories. Should we leave it flat? If Google does not see that category page then there will be no link from the homepage to the content page?
Now: homepage/content-page
Proposed: homepage/category/content-page (category is not indexed)
-
Thanks for the reply.
A couple of comments:
- Do you have an opinion about using the structure I listed above if we are no indexing some categories?
- If we are using the keywords in the title, why are you recommending we leave out the category? Will it be overoptimized as that is another concern.
- We have talked about breadcrumbs for our deeper sites. I thought you needed to have categories to implement these. Is this not true?
-
To make navigations easier you could use breadcrumbs. So when the result show up in SERPS you can get
Home > Category > Post
and the breadcrumbs should also be prominently displayed on the site. I believe it heps spiders and users alike in figuring out the contents structure on your site.
In regards to the proposed structure .. is the category a keyword you would like to target on those pages ? For example if you have Home/Melbourne/CafeHome/Melbourne/MoviesIt would make sense to include Melbourne in there if you are targeting that location .But for something likeHome/News/Keyword-Post-Title Home/News/Keyword-Post-Title2Where your keywords are formed in the post title rather than the category , I would leave it out.One other thing to consider is when changing the structure , you should follow the best practices and make sure you redirect the old ones to the new ones . This is a good starting place : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seoAt the end of the day , it depends on what content you offer and you alone can make the decision .. if having the category in the url will help you rank better
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
-
Large Drop in Indexed Pages But Increase in Traffic
We run a directory site and noticed about a week ago that Google Webmaster Tools was reporting a huge drop in indexed pages (from around 150,000 down to 30,000). In the same time, however, our traffic has increased. Has anyone seen this before or have any ideas on why this could happen? I have search for technical errors but nothing has changed on our site or our content.
Technical SEO | | sa_787040 -
Duplicate Content/Similar Pages
Hello, I'm working on our site and I'm coming into an issue with the duplicate content. Our company manufactures heavy-duty mobile lifts. We have two main lifts. They are the same, except for capacity. We want to keep the format similar and the owner of the company wants each lift to have its own dedicated page. Obviously, since the layout is the same and content is similar I'm getting the duplicate content issue. We also have a section of our accessories and a section of our parts. Each of these sections have individual pages for the accessory/part. Again, the pages are laid out in a similar fashion to keep the cohesiveness, and the content is different, however similar. Meaning different terminology, part numbers, stock numbers, etc., but the overall wording is similar. What can I do to combat these issues? I think our ratings are dropping due to the duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | slecinc0 -
Is my page being indexed?
To put you all in context, here is the situation, I have pages that are only accessible via an intern search tool that shows the best results for the request. Let's say i want to see the result on page 2, the page 2 will have a request in the url like this: ?p=2&s=12&lang=1&seed=3688 The situation is that we've disallowed every URL's that contains a "?" in the robots.txt file which means that Google doesn't crawl the page 2,3,4 and so on. If a page is only accessible via page 2, do you think Google will be able to access it? The url of the page is included in the sitemap. Thank you in advance for the help!
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg0 -
Why is there a difference in the number of indexed pages shown by GWT and site: search?
Hi Moz Fans, I have noticed that there is a huge difference between the number of indexed pages of my site shown via site: search and the one that shows Webmaster Tools. While searching for my site directly in the browser (site:), there are about 435,000 results coming up. According to GWT there are over 2.000.000 My question is: Why is there such a huge difference and which source is correct? We have launched the site about 3 months ago, there are over 5 million urls within the site and we get lots of organic traffic from the very beginning. Hope you can help! Thanks! Aleksandra
Technical SEO | | aleker0 -
Duplicate page/Title content - Where?
Hi, I have just run a crawl on a new clients site, and there is several 'duplicate page content' and 'Duplicate Page Title'' issues. But I cannot find any duplicate content. And to make matters worse. The actual report has confused me. Just for example the about us page is showing in both reports and for both under 'Other URLs' it is showing 1? Why? Does this mean there is 1 other page with duplicate page title? or duplicate page content? Where are the pages that have the duplicate page titles, or duplicate page content? I have run scans using other software and a copyscape scan. And apart from missing page titles, I cannot find any page that has duplicate titles or content. I can find % percentages of pages with similar/same page titles/content. But this is only partial and contextually correct. So I understand that SEO Moz may pick percentage of content, which is fine, and therefore note that there is duplicate content/page titles. But I cannot seem to figure out where I would the source of the duplicate content/page titles. As there is only 1 listed in both reports for 'Other URLs' Hopefully my long question, has not confused. many thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | wood1e20 -
Index page
To the SEO experts, this may well seem a silly question, so I apologies in advance as I try not to ask questions that I probably know the answer for already, but clarity is my goal I have numerous sites ,as standard practice, through the .htaccess I will always set up non www to www, and redirect the index page to www.mysite.com. All straight forward, have never questioned this practice, always been advised its the ebst practice to avoid duplicate content. Now, today, I was looking at a CMS service for a customer for their website, the website is already built and its a static website, so the CMS integration was going to mean a full rewrite of the website. Speaking to a friend on another forum, he told me about a service called simple CMS, had a look, looks perfect for the customer ... Went to set it up on the clients site and here is the problem. For the CMS software to work, it MUST access the index page, because my index page is redirected to www.mysite.com , it wont work as it cant find the index page (obviously) I questioned this with the software company, they inform me that it must access the index page, I have explained that it wont be able to and why (cause I have my index page redirected to avoid duplicate content) To my astonishment, the person there told me that duplicate content is a huge no no with Google (that's not the astonishing part) but its not relevant to the index and non index page of a website. This goes against everything I thought I knew ... The person also reassured me that they have worked within the SEO area for 10 years. As I am a subscriber to SEO MOZ and no one here has anything to gain but offering advice, is this true ? Will it not be an issue for duplicate content to show both a index page and non index page ?, will search engines not view this as duplicate content ? Or is this SEO expert talking bull, which I suspect, but cannot be sure. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, it would make my life a lot easier for the customer to use this CMS software, but I would do it at the risk of tarnishing the work they and I have done on their ranking status Many thanks in advance John
Technical SEO | | Johnny4B0 -
Duplicate Home Page content and title ... Fix with a 301?
Hello everybody, I have the following erros after my first crawl: Duplicate Page Content http://www.peruviansoul.com http://www.peruviansoul.com/ http://www.peruviansoul.com/index.php?id=2 Duplicate Page title http://www.peruviansoul.com http://www.peruviansoul.com/ http://www.peruviansoul.com/index.php?id=2 Do you think I could fix them redirecting to http://www.peruviansoul.com with a couple of 301 in the .htaccess file? Thank you all for you help. Gustavo
Technical SEO | | peruviansoul0 -
50+ duplicate content pages - Do we remove them all or 301?
We are working on a site that has 50+ pages that all have duplicate content (1 for each state, pretty much). Should we 301 all 50 of the URLs to one URL or should we just completely get rid of all the pages? Are there any steps to take when completely removing pages completely? (submit sitemap to google webmaster tools, etc) thanks!
Technical SEO | | Motava0