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
-
Looking for an SEO Mentor
I do in-house marketing for a medium sized luxury architectural design firm. I have a good understanding of the moz platform and general SEO but would like to findsomeone to provide regular guidance and answer some specific questions regarding our SEO. Specifically, we want advising on keywords, blog content, and link building. Ideally we'd like to engage a consultant (remotely) on an hourly basis. We'v have had very poor experiences with big SEO firms so that’s definitely not something we’re looking for. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WorkshopAPD
Caio0 -
Competing URLs
Hi We have a number of blogs that compete with our homepage for some keywords/phrases. The URLs of the blogs contain the keywords/phrases. I would like to re-work the blogs so that they target different keywords that don't compete and are more relevant. Should I change the URLs as I think this is what is mainly causing the issue? If so, should I 301 old URL's to the homepage? For example, say we we're a site that specialised in selling plastic cups. Currently there is a blog with the URL www.mysite.com/plastic-cups that outranks the homepage for _plastic cups. _The blog isn't particularly relevant to plastic cups and the homepage should rank for this term. How should I let Google know that it is the homepage that is most relevant for this term? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Buffalo_71 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Urls in Bilingual websites
1-I have a bilingual website. Suppose that I am targeting a page for keyword "book" and I have included it in that page url for the English version: English version: www.abc.com/book Can I use the translation of "book" in the second language of the website url instead of "book" ? Please let me know which of the following urls are right " French Verison: www.abc.com/fr/book or www.abc.com/fr/livre livre=Book in French 2- Does Google have any tool to check if the second language page of the website has exactly the same content as the English version. What I want to do is for example for a certain page in English version, my targeted keyword is "book" . So my content would be around books. But in the French version of this page, I want to focus on keyword "Pencil" in French instead of "book". Is it wrong or any consequences? That was the main reason for the question number one. Because if it is ok to do what I explained in item 2 then I will set my urls like: In English : www.abc.com/book In French: www.abc.com/fr/crayon crayon=Pencil in French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Image optimization in 2013
hello post the google Image update ( http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/01/faster-image-search.html ) please could you let me know what the status of image optimization is and also what the best practices are? Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
Seo Hosting
Can anyone suggest me some seo hosting providers?But in better price like hostgator?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Adwords Policy and SEO
I have a customer who runs campaigns on adwords and we have had real problems with his ads being taken down due to certain ingredients being present in supplements. Now we move towards his SEO campaign and we wondered if the natural listings are effected by sites that list banned substances or pages listed on the adwords policy as being banned ? Has anyone experienced a site being downgraded by link being present from sites that provided products or services that are banned from being advertised on Google adwords ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Breadcrumb Trail for SEO?
Due to the fact that we aren't in the #1 position, (dropped from #5 to page 2 - You have to love Devs and IT), our heads have hired a SEO Audit/Consultant company to review everything we are doing. I would like to post some of the things they are telling us to do, in which I don't 100% agree with and would like some other professional feedback. Especially since their site isn't marketed very well. http://www.trupanionpetinsurance.com Disclaimer: (this site was a complete nightmare when I started a year and a half ago. Yes, there are many issues that still need to be addressed.) Breadcrumb Trail They have asked us to implement a Breadcrumb trail on every page, where the final page is the only H1 Tag. Are breadcrumb trials important for SEO? (I know they are helpful for Users, but SEO) Are they important for Search Engines to track back for structure. Any thoughts about them? Similar question asked in February : http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-important-are-breadcrumbs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trupanion1