What is your opinion on ideal url structure?
-
-
Hi Jessi,
If I had to pick one of the 3 options, I'd chose the first, simply because it's the shortest.
1. In general, out of all ranking correlations we know of, longer URLs tend to rank slightly lower than shorter ones. It's not a hugely significant factor, but neither is keyword usage in the URL, as recent correlation data has also shown.
2. Many webmasters believe that URLs without numbers tend to receive a higher CTR than URLs with numbers. That's because our eyes tend to glaze over numbers, and they have an auto-generated look and feel to them. Personally, if numbers are necessary, I'd put them as close to the end as possible.
3. Along the same lines, there is some belief in the SEO world that a shorter directory structure (fewer folders and backslashes) tend to perform better in search, as this creates a virtual flat architecture for Google to crawl. That said, the benefit from this is most likely small in relation to other factors.
Just my 2 cents. Hope this helps!
-
MIxed bag unfortunately but as I said, the big players use to have the #1 url structure and switched to the other....
http://zillow.com/homedetails/1949-19th-Ct-Jupiter-FL-33477/2118723028_zpid/
http://www.trulia.com/property/3087033383-1949-19th-Ct-Jupiter-FL-33477
http://www.movoto.com/real-estate/homes-for-sale/FL/Jupiter/1949-19th-Ct-435_R3288099.htm
http://www.homes.com/listing/167972690/1949_19th_Ct_JUPITER_FL_33477
-
Dashes / hyphens have been the preferred style for a while now. I'm not sure about them being separators or not, but as Zachary mentioned Matt Cutts from google mentioned dashes are best practice. What I would do is find the best sites in your industry and analyze what is working for them and not working. Dissect their site with the tools here on seomoz. A point of reference. Seomoz uses dashes not underscores.
-
underscores is a consideration in our case because, for example you have an address like 2345 south blue jay way... we dont care about people searching for blue jays we only care about people searching for 2345 south blue jay way. Not saying its correct, just saying its the reason for consideration.
-
Overall, the address is more of the keyword than the keyword i think in this case. And I think the keywords actual use as a organizational identifier is more important than the seo aspects on it, in our case at least as we would be targeting the address in general.
-
Not necessarily unproven.
The Google Webmaster Tools help article on URL structure still says to use dashes instead of underscores.
Matt Cutts' article from 2005 is dated, but also mentions to use dashes.
By definition an underscore is used to link words, and hyphens are used to join words or break them apart.
Why anyone would use underscores is beyond me, personally.
-
.... additionally, I was asking because the major real estate portals use to do have the #1 url structure and have all recently switched to the latter. @joel, I have read that hyphens are like word separators where underscores will group words together.
-
Your address should be in the meta tags.
-
The third one is best. Keywords should be before address and hyphens look better the underscores. Also it's unproven but there are those who believe hyphens are better for seo than underscores.
-
/co/denver/555-your-address-way/postid
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
-
Google selecting incorrect URL as canonical: 'Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical'
Hi there, A number of our URLs are being de-indexed by Google. When looking into this using Google Search Console the same message is appearing on multiple pages across our sites: 'Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical' 'IndexingIndexing allowed? YesUser-declared canonical - https://www.mrisoftware.com/ie/products/real-estate-financial-software/Google-selected canonical - https://www.mrisoftware.com/uk/products/real-estate-financial-software/'Has anyone else experienced this problem?How can I get Google to select the correct, user-declared canoncial? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nfrank0 -
Preserving Social Shares Through URL Changes
We are making significant URL changes to our website. Because the URL is changing the social sharing buttons are not showing previous shared counts. I have read several resources like the one below that is linked to in several other similar questions. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration However I would love to get some insight from someone who has done this and there thoughts on the outcome. As an ecommerce site the "Social Proof" of products that have received social shares is a big deal to us. In Mike Kings example above the counts are being attributed to the OLD URL which is problematic over time. Our site has been up for over 12 years and has had several major changes to it, and I am certain there will be more in the future, being able to preserve the count on the current URL is ideal. While I agree with him that over time I believe social platforms will let data pass through 301 redirects, until then I need to find the best way to do this. Also with his example and others I have seen people mention than new likes from the new url can reset the counter. If you have gone through this and have ideas pleas share them. I look forward to your thoughts thanks.
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC1 -
Landing Page URL Structure
We are finally setting up landing pages to support our PPC campaigns. There has been some debate internally about the URL structure. Originally we were planning on URL's like: domain.com /california /florida /ny I would prefer to have the URL's for each state inside a "state" folder like: domain.com /state /california /florida /ny I like having the folders and pages for each state under a parent folder to keep the root folder as clean as possible. Having a folder or file for each state in the root will be very messy. Before you scream URL rewriting :-). Our current site is still running under Classic ASP which doesn't support URL rewriting. We have tried to use HeliconTech's ISAPI rewrite module for IIS but had to remove it because of too many configuration issues. Next year when our coding to MVC is complete we will use URL rewriting. So the question for now: Is there any advantage or disadvantage to one URL structure over the other?
Technical SEO | | briankb0 -
Ignore Urls with pattern.
I have 7000 warnings of urls because of a 302 redirect. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/215/44060409.png/ I want to get rid of those, is it possible to get rid of the Urls with robots.txt. For example that it does not crawl anything that has /product_compare/ in its url? Thank you
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Search optimal Tab structure?
Good day, We are in the process of starting a website redesign/development. We will likely be employing a tabbing structure on our home page and would like to be able to capitalize on the keyword content found across the various tabs. The tab structure will be similar to how this site achieves tabs: http://ugmo.com/ I've uploaded a screen grab of this page as the Googlebot user agent. The text "Soil Intelligence for professional Turf Managers" clicks through to this page: http://ugmo.com/?quicktabs_1=1#quicktabs-1 So I'm thinking there could be some keyword dilution there. That said Google is very much aware of the text on the quicktabs-1 page being related to the home page content: http://www.google.com/search?q=Up+your+game+with+precise+soil+moisture%2C+salinity+and+temperature+measurements.+And+in+the+process%2C+save+water%2C+resources%2C+money.+inurl%3Augmo.com&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=&oe= Is this the best search optimal way to add keyword density on a home page with a tab structure? Or is there a better means of achieving this? {61bfcca1-5f32-435e-a311-7ef4f9b592dd}_tabs_as_Googlebot.png
Technical SEO | | Hershel.Miller0 -
Should Canonical URLs be used in Wordpress?
Wordpress offers Canonical URLs in the "All in one SEO" settings. I know that canonical tags for page content will cause the search engine to ignore the content, but I don't understand this setting in Wordpress. The Canonical URLs box for my blog had been checked until a couple weeks ago. I unchecked it (removing the canonical tag) and now I have about 300 duplicate content pages acccording to my SEOMoz reports. It appears that it's just the blog tag in the url now that is causing the confusion. Here's an example of the same url with two tags: http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/aclu/ http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/rfid/ Should I activate the canonical URL setting in Wordpress again. If not, how can I fix this? Your assistance is greatly appreciated. Regards, Brad
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0 -
Re-write of url
Hi, I would like your input on the following dilemma I am wanting to target the keyword "download xml". at the moment Google indexes us on page 2 and indexes the page www.ourdomain.com/download.aspx I would like to rewrite the url to be /download-xml-editor.aspx The current page is a pr5 and is our most trafficked and externally inked to page. My thoughts are quite mixed on how to do this. approach 1: re-write url of "download.aspx" and setup permanent 301 redirect of download.aspx to download-xml-editor.aspx approach 2: create a new page called download-xml-editor and 301 redirect that to the current stronger page which is download.aspx approach 3: create new page called download-xml-editor with unique content and try and get that page to rank over time, allowing it to build up links and not compromise the current page, then later 301 redirect How would you deal with this and what are your recommendations
Technical SEO | | LiquidTech0