Is there any negative SEO effect of having comma's in URL's?
-
Hello,
I have a client who has a large ecommerce website. Some category names have been created with comma's in - which has meant that their software has automatically generated URL's with comma's in for every page that comes beneath the category in the site hierarchy.
eg. 1 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/
eg. 2 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/action-and-adventure/
etc...
I know that URL's with comma's in look a bit ugly! But is there 'any' SEO reason why URL's with comma's in are any less effective?
Kind Regs,
RB
-
Commas in the URL aren't necessarily at an SEO disadvantage. It might be a good idea to change them for better usability and better CTRs, but as Russ says, I don't think this is an urgent task.
-
I have never seen any evidence that commas are negative, however usability can often drive the social factors that may play more and more a role in the future. I wouldn't make it a priority to change those URLs now, but when the time comes (perhaps with a redesign of the website), it would be worth your while to go ahead and remove them.
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
-
Changing URLS: from a short well optimised URL to a longer one – What's the traffic risk
I'm working with a client who has a website that is relatively well optimised, thought it has a pretty flat structure and a lot of top level pages. They've invested in their content over the years and managed to rank well for key search terms. They're currently in the process of changing CMS and as a result of new folder structuring in the CMS the URLs for some pages look to have significantly changed. E.g Existing URL is: website.com/grampians-luxury-accommodation which ranked quite well for luxury accommodation grampians New URL when site is launched on new CMS would be website.com/destinations/victoria/grampians My feeling is that the client is going to lose out on a bit of traffic as a result of this. I'm looking for information or ways or case studies to demonstrate the degree of risk, and to help make a recommendation to mitigate risk.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moge0 -
Domain Name Change-Negative Ranking Effect?
I am considering redirecting my domain name from www.nyc-officespace-leader.com to www.metro-manhattan.com. My company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space, Inc. so the new domain will be more consistent our identity. The Metro domain was registered with GoDaddy five years ago but has only been used for email and for forwarding (entering www.metro-manhattan.com will forward visitor to www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). What is the likely hood that redirecting to the Metro-manhattan.com domain will result in a drop in traffic and ranking? I asked this question a year ago and the results were mixed. But one year is an eternity for Google. I am hoping that re-directs work better now and that if this is implemented correctly there will be no ranking/traffic/domain authority loss. Thoughts?? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
My blog's categories are winning over my landing pages, what to do?
Hi My blogs categories for the ecommerce site are by subject and are similar to the product landing pages. Example Domain.com/laptops that sells laptops Domain.com/blog/laptops that shows news and articles on laptops Within the blog posts the links of anchor laptop are to the store. What to do? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
Mystery 404's
I have a large number of 404's that all have a similar structure: www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw. kemprugelaw keeps getting stuck on the end of url's. While I created www.kempruge.com/example/ I never created the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw page or edited permalinks to have kemprugelaw at the end of the url. Any idea how this happens? And what I can do to make it stop? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Can Dramatically Increasing Site Size Have Negative Effects?
I have a site with about 1000 pages. I'm planning to add about 30,000 pages to it. Can increasing the footprint by such an amount all of a sudden have any negative consequences for existing organic or hoped-for benefits from new pages? Would the site draw any increased scrutiny from Google for doing this? Any other considerations? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Victim of negative SEO
Hello, I'm one of those people that got the "unnatural links" message from google. Since i run my site from the very first day and always was a one man business i know all the ins and outs of the website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Henkiepenkie
Basicly i have never ever used a seo company to submit my site anywhere.
Never ever i used any shady tactic to get better ranks.
The only thing i did was trading traffic/links with real active websites, being daily updated, high traffic, etc etc. So. After i got notified in webmaster tools i started digging into a list (provided by webmaster tools) to find out why i got this message (meanwhile i lost 75% of my se traffic in past 3 months) After searching for hours i found out that in the past 2 / 3 months my site has been spammed on about 150 forums (completely dead forums with nothing but spam on it) There was no logic at all since my site got linked with the most ridiculous and unlogical word phrases.
My site is adult related and all spam links contained word phrases like "bangladesh mobile" or "rock girl" or "animal abuse" or "ringtones" etc etc. if i ever would be so stupid to start spamming my 7 year old strong business i would at least use titles that would make sence. anyway.
I can't do nothing about these forums, i don't own them, i can't erase them and if there are any owners, they simply don't respond.
I made a list of all the forums and send it to google but the only response they come up with is "there are still unnatural links". I hardly believe they did anything with that list i send them. I don't know what else i can do and was hoping that somebody could advice me on what to do here besides sending google messages on a daily base. cheers0 -
.com ranking over other ccTLD's that were created
We had a ecommerce website that used to function as the website for every other locale we had around the world. For example the French version was Domain.com/fr_FR/ or a German version in English would be Domain.com/en_DE/. Recently we moved all of our larger international locales to their corresponding ccTLD so no we have Domain.fr and Domain.de.(This happened about two months ago) The problem with this is that we are getting hardly any organic traffic and sales on these new TLD's. I am thinking this is because they are new but I am not positive. If you compare the traffic we used to see on the old domain versus the traffic we see on the new domain it is a lot less. I am currently going through to make sure that all of the old pages are not up and the next thing I want to know is for the old pages would it be better to use a 301 re-direct or a rel=canonical to the new ccTLD to avoid duplicate content and those old pages from out ranking our new pages? Also what are some other causes for our traffic being down so much? It just seems that there is a much bigger problem but I don't know what it could be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Understanding Google's keyword tool...
When I type in Google a keyword like : boot camp I get results that show Bootcamp (one word) traffic in the tens of thousands. I see many words combined. Does this mean that tens of thousands of people every month are misspelling that keyword? How should I interpret this in terms of anchor texting? I would hate to deliberately misspell it on my website just to get traffic. For those interested, my website is: http://ultimatebasictraining.com/admin/ (currently revaming my http://ultimatebasictraining.com website)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0