Site Structure question
-
when deciding the Site structure for a e-commerce site Is it better to keep everything mysite.com/widget.html or use categories like mysite.com/Gifts/widget.html
-
Check out this post by Lunametrics on Designing a Google Analytics Friendly Site. You'll see that there is an advantage to having a little more structure and organization to your URLs when you want to go back and look at your analytics.
-
If the categories themselves are terms that you want to compete in the SERP's for then having them is worth considering if not I would lean towards the /productname approach rather than /category/productname
-
That is more often than not an organizational preference. However, there is a benefit to having your keywords in the URL. So in your example, if "gifts" is a keyword then there is a benefit. But if you wrote the first as mysite,com/gifts-widget.html then the point would go back to preference.If you want your site to be heavily associated with a category, like /gifts/ then I would opt for the category.And to add to that, the Google Bot does try to think on it's own now, so it may test your /category/ page for it's own content, which could put a slight advantage on the category. But that is pure skepticism.
So your choice, but I would lean toward creating keyword categories.
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
-
Structured markup for wordpress
Hello, I am having problems with marking up my WP posts. I used the All-in-One which seems to be the most user-friendly, except when I denote the aspects of the "article" and update, the markup shows up as a box at the bottom of the post (even though the info is in the text). How do I mark these up for Google without having the unseemly box at the bottom? Thanks so much in advance for any help! Btw, I am not altogether comfortable just yet on manual schematic markup (if you have a really basic manual markup that will let me do so across various platforms, I would also appreciate the recommendation). Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer1 -
Subdomain question
Hi guys, I have a subdomain on my site that i want to completely remove from the index. I tried already everything to remove it but it is special situation so the only choice i have left is to remove it from Search Console in "Remove URLs" feature. So my question is: if i remove my root subdomain (example: http://subdomain.mydomain.com/) via "Remove URLs" feature in Webmaster Console, will it remove all the URLs coming from that particular domain as well? I also want to make sure that my root domain will stay untouched and be functioning normally. Thank you for advice!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
Mobile website question
Hi Mozzers, A website I manage has a mobile friendly version of their main website and a /m version as well. I was wondering if anyone had any experience in the best way of handling this? Should we just get rid of the /m version and tag the mobile friendly version? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Internal Ads on A Site
We serve ads on our site using a sub-domain. All ads use a re-direct from ads.domain before redirecting users to the proper, normal, internal url. Most the content on our home page is ad block driven. Is it possible and does it make sense to enter the sub-domain as url parameter in Google Webmaster tools, letting Google know that this is something to be ignored. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Help with site structure needed - any assistance welcomed!
Hi all, I am currently tasked with finding a better way to optimise our website ukdocumentstorage dot com. For starters, I would like to know what our site structure actually is at present. So I would like to be able to see which pages are linking to what at the moment & which pages have broken links on which I need to remove from the content. Hopefully I'd then be able to tidy up any errors that the site already has in its internal linking. Is there a way to do this easily? Or to have a graphical representation of the sites structure? I have just signed into our Webmaster Tools account and I am faced with a list of 10 'Crawl Errors' which are all 404 errors. Some of them do not actually exist anymore, but are still being linked to from a few pages according to WMT. For example, /industries_served_legal.htm is still being linked to from 5 of our pages (including /industries_served_local_authority.htm) However, this doesn't seem to be a case at all on the page as I can't find a link to /industries_served_legal.htm on /industries_served_local_authority.htm. Any advice as to why this is happening? Is there a way to find out easily where these broken links are situated on the page? And if I do actually manage to find our broken links, how would I go about removing them? The page /document_security.htm doesn't exist in our Sitewizard list of pages anymore, yet still exists online. How do I go about deleting this unecessary page properly? And does this harm our rankings? The document_security page also has an extra link on the top toolbar to a Document Management page, an addition which is no longer present on our up to date pages. Now this page (and the extra dropdown page when you hover over it) still exist on our list of Sitewizard pages at the moment, but we obviously no longer want to have these online anymore. How should I remove these? I understand that this is a lot of information, and so I would appreciate any help that can be given on these! Many thanks
Technical SEO | | janc0 -
How Often is Site Crawled
Good morning- I saw some errors in my first crawl and immediately removed the pages from my website. I then re-created my XML sitemap and uploaded to Google. The question I have is will the site be crawled to recognize the changes in the next day or so? The pages were just placed on the site as test pages and never removed. The initial crawl that notified me it was done found the errors and were removed. Thanks for your help. Peter
Technical SEO | | VT_Pete0 -
Blogger Blog URL Structure Questions
I'm starting to use my blog more and wanted to ask about an issue I've read about on SEOmoz in the past. I use blogger instead of wordpress. It's quick and simple - I have no interest in switching to wordpress for this particular blog. My blog is currently setup as blog.site.com. Is it still important (for seo reasons) to switch from blog.site.com to site.com/blog? If so, is there a way to do this in blogger? And if I do this, will my past posts lose their authority if their redirected to the new url structure? Rand mentions in this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls "never use multiple subdomains" - This is an old article, but I've seen this mentioned several times. Does this still hold true? Am I losing out on links to my blog? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0 -
Frustrating Local Seo Question
I have just lost the top stop on Google Places (Pack 7) for one of my clients. The company that took it came out of nowhere to take the top stop. Now I don't mind getting out ranked when someone has worked hard to out rank me but what is frustrating is this site scores terrible across the board on just about every score that is supposed to determine on and off page ranking factors. The only place it outscores is in the link department but the site is so new there is no data available in OSE. The site has 0's and 1's for PA, MR and MT plus the keyword (kitchen remodeling) that it is taking the top spot for scores and F in the SEOMoz on page report card while the page that I optimized for this very same keyword scores an A. Plus this site has zero citations according to Bright Local Data. What Gives? Here is a little bit of data: Keyword: Kitchen Remodeling My Clients website is http://www.tandmkitchens.com Competitors website: http://www.njkitchendesigns.com I'm kicking his butt in every category except Domain Age and inbound link total, his inbound link total is 409 but it's only from 2 domains.
Technical SEO | | fun52dig
Any thoughts on how this is possible would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all and Merry Christmas!
Gary1