Formatting dynamic urls?
-
We have a long-time previously well-established website that was hit by panda.
On one section of the site, we have dynamic urls that include %20 in them (e.g. North%20America). It's recently come to our attention that google has both a version of the url with a plus sign (+) and the version with the %20 (space) (e.g. North+America).
Upon researching this, it seems that a hyphen (-) is preferable to either of the above. We obviously need to remove the %20's from the urls as they can cause issues. So, should we stick with the + sign since it's already indexed and ranking or do a 301 rewrite and change them all to hyphens instead of the plus sign? This is the one section of the site that has maintained rankings through the panda debacle, so we need to take that into consideration as we don’t want to lose the rankings that we have.
Along the same lines, we have two other sections of the site that provide search results as well, though these are all formatted to use a plus sign. Is it advisable to do a 301 rewrite to change the plus signs to hyphens on these as well or just leave them alone? This particular section has lost rankings over the last year with panda updates.
-
I would recommend reformatting the Urls for pages that have lost rankings. Then, just choose a few of the pages that retained their rank to try hyphens instead of + sign. Track them. If they improve, then do the rest of them. If they decline, remove the 301 redirects and return them to what they were and leave the rest of them as is.
Dana
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
-
New website on new url?
We have a new website on a new url (been up for around 2 years now) and our old website is slowly fading in the background, we are now at the point where the money is still ok but we are having issues running both side by side, we have a calculator on each page and are thinking about removing this and adding a box with please order from our new site here (with url of similar page). Now the issue is we don't want to link for SEO purposes and google hammer us (thinking of no - following these) and we also have a penalty we got in 2012 on the site but we did get out of this, would this cause any issue to the new site?
Technical SEO | | BobAnderson1 -
Can you 404 any forms of URL?
Hi seomozzers, <colgroup><col width="548"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F256%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F258%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F242%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F257%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F260%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F225%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F251%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F176%23comment-form | These are duplicate content and the canonical version is: http://www.ex.com/user (login and pass page of the website) Since there were multiple other duplicates which mostly have been resolved by 301s, I figured that all "LOGIN" URLs (above) should be 404d since they don't carry any authority and 301 those wouldn't be the best solution since "too many 301s" can slow down the website speed. But a member of the dev team said: "Looks like all the urls requested to '404 redirect' are actually the same page http://ex.com/user/login. The only part of the url that changes is the variables after the "?" . I don't think you can (or highly not recommended) make 404 pages display for variables in a url. " So my question is: I am not sure what he means by that? and Is it really better to not 404 these? Thanks0 -
Order of keyword usage in URL
Hi, I have been wondering for a few weeks if the order of keyword usage for a long tail keyword made a difference. Today I ran an on-page report here for a new page which is a review of a product. The report warned about the keyword usage in URL which made me question my knowledge about this. let's say the page is titled Razer Mouse Review my URL is www.example.com/review/razer-mouse I thought it was a bad idea to repeat the same word in a URL, that's why I categorized all my reviews under review directory and avoided using the word "review" more than once. Should I modify this url and make it www.example.com/review/razer-mouse-review Note: I see the report listed this under "moderate importance factors" and still gave the page A grade. any ideas appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Gamer070 -
Keywords in Vanity URL
If I set up a vanity URL that just 301's to the main site, do the search engines look at the keywords in the vanity URL when determing how to rank the site. For example, if I set up a vanity URL of www.coolnewtechgear.com, and redirect it to www.company.com/products/, would the search engines view the keywords of cool, new, tech, and gear and associate that with the page it's getting redirected to? Or does it ignore the vanity URL and only look at the content of the page itself?
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0 -
How do you manage Wordpress URL hierarchy with permalinks?
I have quite a few website in Wordpress but I continuously run into the same issue. With permalinks it is not recommended to use /%category%/%post_name%/ because it puts an undue load on your bandwidth, server and makes the crawler crawl a ton of duplicate content pages. On one site changing to that hierarchy even crashed some of the pages (probably a permissions error). I would like a correct information hierarchy, but this doesn't seem like correct play. What do you use as your URL hierarchy?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider
Do you have any plugins or fixes for this issue? Thanks0 -
Blog URLs
I read somewhere - pretty sure is was in Art of SEO - that having dates in the blog permalink URLs was a bad idea. e.g. /blog/2011/3/my-blog-post/ However, looking at Wordpress best practice, it's also not a good idea to have a URL without a number - it's more resource hungry if you don't , apparently. e.g. /blog/my-blog-post/ Does anyone have any views on this? Thanks Ben
Technical SEO | | atticus70 -
Slashes In Url's
If your cms has created two urls for the same piece of content that look like the following, www.domianname.com/stores and www.domianname.com/stores/, will this be seen as duplicate content by google? Your tools seem to pick it up as errors. Does one of the urls need 301 to the other to clear this up, or is it not a major problem? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | gregster10000 -
When URL rewrite can lead to un pretty URLs
Hi Mozzers. I've a client that has done a little bit of mess rewriting the URLs of its site. In fact, also the data base driven URLs are rewritten, but the dev forgot to change the space with "-", so that now the 95% of the URLs are like this one: http://www.portalesardegna.com/search/Appartamenti e Residence/ Obviously not really a pretty URL. I am not so sure if this issue has an SEO consecuences (in fact, the site ranks pretty well also with those kind of url), but I am thinking more on usability issue. Could you suggest me any easy fix to this rewrite problem?
Technical SEO | | gfiorelli12