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
-
How to Optimize With Wordpress SEO Plugin YOAST?
Hi Everyone, I am currently using Moz's page optimization format to improve our website's SEO. https://mathandmovement.com/ This is the format, these are all of the areas that we need to improve for each of our website's pages, according to Moz. include 3 keywords max: <url>www.mysite.com/my-keyword-phrase</url> <page title="">2 keywords max <title>Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword - Brand</title></page> 2 keywords max: keywords in my headers 2 keywords max: keywords in my headers ![keyword](image file) <focus keyword="">1 with YOAST</focus> We are currently using the free version of YOAST for our SEO. My question to you is this, will our pages still have good SEO if we use appropriate keywords (high monthly volume, below 40 difficulty ranking, High Organic CTR,) and put them in the format above? Or since the free version of YOAST only let's us optimize 1 keyword, will we still rank for the other two/three that we put in our meta and page titles/h1s, h2s, urls, and overall paragraph text? Please also let us know what we can do to improve our SEO! Thanks so much, Emma
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emmamathandmovement0 -
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 -
Tips for quick SEO
Hi guys (first time posting). I'm involved in many differnt marketing activities on an ecommerce site and don't always get a lot of time to focus on SEO (although I appreciate its importance). What are your tips for the most effective SEO tasks to focus on considering these time constraints? Think 80/20 applied to SEO. Thanks. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Tracking URLS and Redirects
We have a client with many archived newsletters links that contain tracking code at the end of the URL. These old URLs are pointing to pages that don't exist anymore. Is there a way to set up permanent redirects for these old URLs with tracking code? We have tried and it doesn't seem to work. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BopDesign0 -
Mobile SEO
Hi there, My website when searching via mobile is now showing the mobile version of the site in SERPs, well for quite sometime now to be honest, anyway the ranking in mobile are no different to what they are on desktop, is there actually anything I can do to influence my mobile SERPs? 9 times out of 10 it's desktop websites that are ranking about me in mobile search. Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Pagination & SEO
I have the WP-Pagination plugin and I am wondering how to handle duplicate content issues and what's best for SEO. My developer initially downloaded the plugin to speed up loading for the home page. Now my home page has 21 pages of paginated content. But the pagination continues with each of my categories as well. Should I be placing a canonical reference to my home page, or category main page? My site name is gracessweetlife (dot) com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gracessweetlife0 -
E-Commerce SEO
Dear SeoMoz fans, I'm really glad to be a part of the community. Just have a quick question. I run a marketplace similar to eBay where users sell the products. I would like some suggestions on how to effectively proceed with SEO for an ecommerce marketplace of this type. Should I be proceed developing product review or product comparison landing pages and build links towards them as often suggested or should I consider alternative marketing methods? Looking forward to your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | buzzmartseo0 -
Canonical and optimization
Hi, I was thinking: If I had 4 pages, each of them optimized for an especific keyword, but set a canonical url to another page, would this another page rank for the 5 specific keywords? Ex: Page 1- Shoes
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroVillalobos
Page 2- Snickers
Page 3- Socks
Page 4- Feet
All set the canonical url to Page 5 Page 5 will rank for all this four keywords?0