Optimal URLs for SEO and UX
-
We are considering restructuring the URL scheme on one of the websites we maintain.
We have a few options.
Currently news article URLs are as follows:
http://domain.com/news/1234/article-title-name/Download section URLs are as follows:
http://domain.com/downloads/files/1234/file-title-of-download-here/Forum URLS:
http://forum.domain.com/forum/topic/1234/title-of-forum-topic-here/We feel that these are a bit too long for both SEO and user experience. We want to remove as many directories from the URLs as possible.
From experience, what do you recommend changing for the example URLs above?
We have some ideas below...and we need to keep the ID in the URLs...however I know this is a little frustrating.
Some ideas we have for news articles:
http://domain.com/news/article-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/article-title-shorter-n1234Some ideas for the download pages:
http://domain.com/downloads/file-title-shorter-d1234
http://domain.com/downloads/files/file-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/file-title-shorter-d1234Some ideas for the forum URLs:
http://forum.domain.com/topic-title-shorter-t1234
http://forum.domain.com/topic/topic-title-shorter-1234What do you think of these suggestions? Any other URL ideas? Recommended URL length?
The purpose of is question was to find the perfect URLs for the site we are working on; your thoughts, suggestions and tips are very much appreciated.
-
Hi Peter,
Given that the site is 10 years old and that the URLs were already updated once fairly recently. I would leave them as they are exceot for those that have more than 3-5 keywords, or those that contain "stop" words like "and" "the" "of" etc. This would be pretty easy to do if you dumped all your URLs into excel and sorted them accordingly.
If you feel very strongly that your search traffic would improve if you changed them, I would suggest picking one section or category of the site and doing those first. Monitor what happens. If you get good results, then go ahead and change the rest.
Hope that helps!
Dana
-
Thank you do your reply Dana.
The site is over 10 years old, however the URL schema was already updated just over a year ago to the URLs I mentioned above.
Before that, everything was from the root...for example:
http://domain.com/article1234.html
http://domain.com/download1234.htmlFrom a SEO standpoint, do you think that updating the URL structure will be beneficial? I.e. is it really worth it? Are we missing out on organic traffic with the current scheme? And would it be worth changing? Or could we get on just fine without changing anything?
Thank you for your suggestions and comments.
-
I always recommend the simplest and shortest URL ideas to all my clients because this way a website user can easily guess what the page is about without getting in to page. The short and easy URLs are good with search engines and links as people can easily link to it and as short and clear URLs are SEO friendly you get the search love from it as well...
In your case i would highly recommend to go for the following URL scheme:
News:
http://www.domain.com/news/what-the-news-topic-is/7543
Download Section:
http://www.domain.com/downloads/file-for-download-8743/
Forum URLs:
http://www.domain.com/forum/whatever-thetheat-name-is/
This way you will get lot of search engine and user love. Remember to plan the redactions before you go for implementation or else you might face a SEO smack that would be hard to recover.
hope this helps...
-
No worries.I think your post looks fine. Here's my recommendation (and much of this is based on advice given by Everett Sizemore in his webinar on technical SEO for E-commerce). Even if your site isn't an e-commerce site, I think what I am going to recommend still holds true.
My recommendation would be to keep the news, downloads file and forums subdirectories in place. The reason I recommend this is from a content management and organization standpoint. Even if your site isn't large now, you probably want it to grow significantly. Once it does, or if it is already a large site, managing your content from a hierarchical and organizational standpoint will be so much easier if you leave those subdirectories in place. Imagine trying to move to a new platform at some point int the future and having ALL of your content only one level down. When you go to list out all of your URLs, without that subdirectory in them, you'll have no idea from looking at the URL where that page is on the site.
Also, if the site is well-established (say, more than five years old) and has built up some decent authority, be aware that 301 redirects to pass authority, but they don't pass ALL authority, so you could be devaluing your existing pages by making the re-writes.
If you feel the site is young enough and would be strengethened in the long run for SEO and UX by having shorter URLS (which I do think is a good idea) then here would be my recommendation:
http://domain.com/news/article-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/downloads/file-title-shorter-d1234
http://forum.domain.com/forums/topic-title-shorter-1234
I hope this helps! and by all means check out Everett's webinar located here: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues . I think his advice applies to this scenario even if it's not an e-commerce site.
Dana
-
Sorry that this post looks so messy, I'm posting from an iPad and it's not taking the line breaks from the plain text editor... I'll see if I can add some HTML breaks...
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
-
SEO Value of Google+?
Hi Mozers, Does having a Google+ page really impact SEO? Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Keyword in URL - SEO impact
Hi, We don't have most important keyword of our industry in our domain or sub-domain. How important it is to have keyword in website URL? Most of our competitors pages with "keyword" urls been listing in SERP. What is back-links role in this scenarion? And which URL have more advantage? keyword in sub-domain or page with keyword. Like for "seo" keyword..... seo.example.com or example.com/seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Canonical Issue with urls
I saw some urls of my site showing duplicate page content, duplicate page title issues on crawl reports. So I have set canonical url for every urls , that has dupicate content / page title. But still SeoMoz crawl test is showing issue. I am giving here one url with issue. The below given urls shown duplicate content and duplicate page title with some other urls all are given below. Checked URL http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7635 dup page content http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622&category_id=270&colors=Black_Tones&click=colors&ci=1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trixmediainc
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 dup page Title http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636&category_id=270&sizes=12x15,12x18&click=sizes
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622&category_id=270&colors=Black_Tones&click=colors&ci=1
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 But I have set canonical url for all these urls already , that is :- http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 This should actually solve the problem right ? Search engine should identify the canonical url as original url and only should consider that. Thanks0 -
Local SEO tips
Hi! I'm working on http://www.hgsplumbingandheating.co.uk/ at the moment, and it's going pretty well for local terms such as 'Norwich plumber' etc. Has anyone got any tips though on how it can be improved, especially with regard to getting the homepage ranking above the Places listings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
SEO Provider
At the risk of opening the flood gates, I'm posting this in hopes of finding a SEO provider on this site. I'm currently a member, and have learned a lot through this site, but I'm still having issues ranking higher. Because of this, I have come to the conclusion that I need a dedicated SEO company/professional who can help our company reach the next level. I'm open to suggestions of companies that you have used, or please feel free to throw your hat into the ring. Thanks in advance! AW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheCTC0 -
Long URL with QueryStrings
Hi, I have a search page that generates some querystrings (with the term, current page, number of pages etc). This long url is something bad for Google indexing? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GDB0 -
Changing my url name? Should I do it?
Hi, I am targeting a brand called Creative Recreation, who are a trainers brand. We currently rank ok-ish for certain terms for Creative Recreation Trainers, Footwear and Creative Recreation [INSERT STYLE NAME HERE]. Our main search term I think we would like to improve on is "creative recreation trainers" as we are 6th for this. Our domain name points to the brands page as designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/creative-recreation/ Now what I want to know is, would it be worthwhile or would it affect my current rank/index if I changed the end of that url to read /creative-recreation-trainers/ thus getting the keyword phrase in the url? Creative-Recreation is a hard one to crack as you have a lot of competition from the brands site etc.. Any ideas on this? Cheers Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0