Do a lot of related articles in lower subfolders, boost higher level subfolder keywords?
-
For instance www.example1.com/cooltopic/ has 5 ‘verycool articles’ under /cooltopic/
www.example1.com/cooltopic/verycool-article1/ , www.example1.com/cooltopic/verycool-article2/.
On www.example2.com/cooltopic/ there are 100 ‘verycool articles’
Who will rank above the other for the term ‘cooltopic’ in the SERPS? Is it www.example1.com with 5 ‘verycool articles’ or www.example2.com with 100 ‘verycool articles’. Or does the quantity of (theme related) articles in subfolders not matter?
And what if example1.com has more quality external links from the ‘awesome community’. Would this change a lot in the rankings?
Or what if both domains have 0 external links, but example2.com has 95 more internal links (from the articles) to /cooltopic/ than example1.com with only 5 articles.
-
Thanks again for your input,
The reason this question arrose was because i was thinking of a news structure from a users perspective and my collgeague from a technical standpoint. Also he showed me how a friend of his got to the first page in the serps simply by moving a lot of related content under a subfolder.
This i found hard to believe, that simply putting in content under a subfolder would make the higher subfolder automatically rank higher.
Up to 5 years ago i thought sites rank well because they write a lot of articles, then i in 2007 i started reading up and focussing on SEO and understood that its not about quantity but quality and hierarchy and that really got me interested in SEO.
So i thought a 'traditional' news category like www.example.com/news/ with related articles (inter)linking to related subfolder landing pages would be a logical experience for the user and thus for bots. But 'sparring' with my colleague who is imo a very good programmer, made me second guess myself and the situation, and thus i ended up asking the great seomoz community :).
So thanks again for the input and will probably have the articles both under www.example.com/news/topic-article1/ and under www.example.com/topic/news/opic-article1/ (with a canonical tag on it).
Also i have never thought about the concequences for CTR in the SERPS using the dates in the url's. Thats a very valid point and wil have to take a look at how 'evergreen' the written news articles are. Comming to think of it I also unconsciously ávoid' sites with urls showing old dates when searching for something specific. I even goes as fas as changing the date range in search settings.
I've added a video for you enjoyment. It's the one and only SEO Rapper from way back when... enjoy
-
I htink that /related-topic/news can work, but it does depend on the topic and what people are looking for and expecting.
If they got to /related-topic/news will they miss out on stuff that they are likely to want to see under /other-topic/news ? Will people be looking for /news/ which this structure probably wouldn't support that well? Users first - bot second.
One other tip: If you are thinking of adding date in to the URL have a think about how evergreen your content is likely to be. If it is all really topical then date in url can work well: People search, can see it is recent and your CTR will go up.
However if you are using the same content area for longer term content then it can have the opposite effect. Someone searches a year later, seest the old date and assumes that it is our dated even if it isn't.
-
Hi Mat Bennett,
First of thanks a lot for thinking about my predicament and giving a well-structured reply.
The reason why i asked the question had to do with the placing of news articles on our website.
Initially i would say news articles should go under www.example.com/news/article-title/ or similar www.example.com/news/2012/october/article-title/
But my colleague has placed news under a theme related section like this www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/ with the idea that this would boost www.example.com/related-topic/ for the keyword ‘related-topic’.
His thinking is that google looks at the url like this -> www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/ then checks out www.example.com/related-topic/news/ and then google crawls www.example.com/related-topic/.
So by placing a lot of theme related news articles in a subfolder google would crawl www.example.com/related-topic/ more often. His point being the url is optimized for google and menu structure and links onsite are optimized for the users experience. After reading your reply and some more discussion, we will probably end up doing the following -> Create a news system then place the news under www.example.com/news/article-title or www.example.com/news/2012/october/article-title. And also place the news articles under the related main categories like so www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/.
And to avoid duplicate content issues www.example.com/news/article-title would be canonically linked to www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/ (this being the ‘original’).
This way we should cater to both the user and search engine.
What do u think of such a setup?
P.S. movie tip. I watched ‘Indie Game - the movie’ last night and it was very inspirational.
-
I think I follow.
Looking at it in a vacuum I would say that example2 has a tiny advantage. The net link equity of what is pointing back to the category page is the same in both cases, but there is greater emphasis from the internal anchor text. In practical terms this will be very small though.
In a real situation there are so many larger issues at play that you'd struggle to measure this. the effects in incoming links, overall domain authority, on page optimisation etc etc etc are going to far out weigh this.
Reading between the lines...
I am guessing that you are really asking "should I structure my site like this, or like that?". If that is the question then do what makes for the most usable site. Do though factor in whether more category pages could be useful in their own right as landing pages as well.
Picking the most usable site means a site that people are more likely to enjoy using. That means that they stay longer, hopefully make you some money whilst they are there, mention it to friends, tweet it, share it, link to it etc. Those things can bring real,measurable benefits
I hope that is useful.
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
-
Build pages to target keywords, or audiences, or both?
I'm building a marketing site for a client that does stage lighting design. They also do commissioned artwork installations, interactive design for tradeshows, etc. Because their work spans multiple industries (concerts, performing arts, live television, television advertising), I'm trying to figure out if their content should be targeting the industry, or the actual services they offer. There seems to be enough search volume to target traffic for specific clusters of keywords, but I think it would be a better user experience to tailor pages towards audiences. Should I lean towards creating pages for services offered ,or potential audiences? (A page for lighting design and one for interactive video displays, vs a page for museum directors and one for agencies) Or both? Thanks for any help!!
On-Page Optimization | | bigwheeler0 -
Agency Domain Authority Boosting Activity
Hi Guys Have been reading up a bit on methods for boosting Domain Authority and am generally finding that the best way is by producing unique and relevant content through blogs and other kinds of articles. Having multiple clients in an agency means that there is limited time for this and I need something else to assist in boosting Domain Authority. I perform a fair bit of backlinking through online directories, however I am also finding that most blog comment sections have implemented 'no follow' codes to reduce spam content. There are plenty of free online directories, and many with high Domain Authorities, however they can take up to months for the listings to be approved. I am performing other activities to boost keyword rankings in Google for our clients but need some help with getting their Domain Authority up. Does anyone know of an efficient method for boosting Domain Authority for an agency with many clients where blog writing for each may not be a viable option? Would be great to hear anyone's ideas!
On-Page Optimization | | JuiceBoxOM0 -
? Keyword stuffing
I have a new website. Did "on page grading". Although the page received a grade of A the only area that did not receive a check mark was key word stuffing. It recommended I not use keyword more that 15 times but I only counted 11 uses of the key phrase "breast augmentation." However the phrase is also used in alt tag of images which would take me over 15. Are alt tag on images counted and is this a concern? I tried to use "augmentation mammaplasty" to reduce the use of the phrase "breast augmentation" but will use of "augmentation" and "breast" alone also cause the count to increase for the phrase "breast augmentation"
On-Page Optimization | | wianno1680 -
Image alt tags shouldn't contain keywords?
Hi Everyone, I've been informed recently that keyword within your image alt tags can be a trigger for penguin if you have your keyword mentioned too often on the page (over-optimisation). I'm not sure I understand why though, the reason for this is, we have a page which features a picture and a description of a product. The page title, heading, a mention in content and image alt all contain a keyword which is the product name. I've been told to remove these alt tags but aren't alt tags important for screen readers and other W3C complacency issues, so removing the product names from the alt (which also happens to be the keyword for the product pages but is best describing what the image is) would make these image useless to users with certain disabilities, so if its true that doing this can be a negative signal isn't this breaking googles guidelines by not providing good content for those users? Would it be better to remove these alt tags or attempt to remove keyword elsewhere on the page? or can anyone suggest something else? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | AMA-DataSet0 -
Positioning the keyword in two pages
Hi there! I've decided to use four criteria (keywords) for my website. The "problem" is that I have to use the same keyword (criteria) in two different pages. Is there a problem If I do this? On the other side, there are two sections of the web that (I assume) must have title and description tag as well as a keyword/criteria (Contact and Registration)....any advice?¿should they have a ttile and a description?¿Should they have a keyword associated? Thanks in advance for the answer.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Meta keywords and meta news keywords
I've got a question regarding this. So normally Meta keywords it is not relevant and we shouldn't use them, however there are opinions that we can use them as these are signals for other Search Engines. Meta news keywords - are ok to be used in the news sites. what is your opinion on using both of them on a news site? Can this help, or harm? thanks, Irina
On-Page Optimization | | InformMedia0 -
Relating forum discussions to improve internal linking
Hi all, I have a matter i would like a discussion about, since I am looking for a good solution. First the case: I have a site with a large community based discussion board. We daily have 40 to 80 active forum threads with average of 200 posts. As it is right now each thread page shows, at the bottom of the thread, the 20 threads with latest activity. From a SEO point of view this is not the best solution, since all thread pages passes link juice to the latest 20 threads. However, the threads change daily so the juice is sprayed around all over the place. What I want to do is related forum threads, such that each thread at the bottom shows up to 10 threads which could be of interest to the reader. In this way one thread will have more or less the same threads at the bottom at all time, unless the relevancy is better for other threads, causing som minor changes to happen over time. The question is, how can one do this? In the backend, the forum has two tables. One holding threads and one holding posts relating to the threads. All in all the system has 66.500 threads, and in total 469.000 posts. Every thread has a title, and the posts are of varying length. The threads have categories, but they are not so distinct that a thread in one category can not be related to a thread in another category. So I would like to make the relevancy from the title of the thread and the content of the forum posts. As of yet I have not come up with a good solution, and i will look forward to reading any feedback for this. I will answer any questions as fast as possible, to get a good discussion goint here. Best regards, Rasmus
On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang0 -
Rename index.php or keyword in URL?
It is important for me to get good search results for keyword + city name For instance: tulips amsterdam What would be better: renaming index.php or adding the cityname to the URL? www.example.com/amsterdam/tulips OR www.example.com/pages/tulips-amsterdam
On-Page Optimization | | svdg0