URL Structure Q - /UniqueURL/ProductA or /SubcategoryURL/ProductA?
-
Hi Mozers,
I have a niche ecommerce site http://www.ecustomfinishes.com that sells custom barn wood furniture. I have about 600 products online. 2 weeks ago I started rewriting my urls from /subcategoryurl/ProductA to /UNIQUEURL/productA for my individual products,
For example for my subcategory farm tables (150 products) I had
- /rustic-farm-tables/productA,
- /rustic-farm-tables/ProductB ...."rustic-farm-table" about 150 times.
2 weeks ago I started changing the 150x "/rustic-farm-table/" to a more descriptive URL such as
- /white-farm-table/producA
- /rustic-square-dining-table/ProductB
- /Black-harvest-table/ProductC
Here is why I am need advice:
- I have 1181 pages,
- the page with the most entrances with "rustic-farm-tables" is #31/1181 based on entrances. the 2nd most is #71/1181
- Alternatively, I have 13 table product pages such a as /12ft-Rustic-Farm-Dining-Table-p/12-foot-table-with-inlay.htm" that get more entrances than any product that includes "rustic-farm-tables"
- Since changing the urls to be product specific, my overall traffic has dropped 20%!!!
So here is my question:
- do i continue to have the /UNIQUEURL/product be unique to the product, which is consistant amongst my best preforming pages, yet has dropped my traffic 20% in the last 2 weeks, OR do i keep /SAME-URL/product which written as a best practice, and be happy with the traffic I had?
- Could the 20% drop just be a temporary shock? Why would this happen?
This would be a good long tail/head term experiment. Try to get more head terms, or do what you can do focus on long tail. I hope i was able to explain this well, I say follow the best practices of my best preforming pages, however the 20% drop has me worried.
Thank you in advance for your help
-
Hi Simon,
Thank you for your response. I understand the google algo update, and according to matt cutts it seems like this is for urls that are intended to pick up on one search, like www.seohelpinmassachussetts.com, but wouldnt effect website.com/seo-help-in-mass.
To your second comment, my apologies if I did not explain clearly enough, but the driver for my changes is that some of my product pages are getting a lot of entrance traffic and most are getting very very little traffic. I want more entrances for the product pages, so i am replicating what is working. Specifically, all/most of the pages that are getting the high entrances have uniqueurl/product, whereas the ones with /subcategory/product are all getting very little. The shock is my drop in traffic, despite replication of what is working best for my pages. This posted question is to see if anyone has any reactions suggestions or cautions before i make this major adjustment to my site.
best,
Chris
-
Hi Chris
Your timing was quite unfortunate as Google rolled out 2 fairly major algorithm changes on 27th Sept - 2 weeks ago today. This may have muddied the waters a little with regards to understanding the reason for your drop in traffic.
It is always quite risky doing a lot of URL re-writing at once - presumably you put 301 redirects from the old to new URL structure? (in case you didn't that is a crucial step in altering the structure of your URLs / changing page names, and may be related to the traffic drop - some useful pointers on that here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/transferring-to-new-url-structure-301-existing-ones)
I am not sure I understand your driver for doing the changes - the URLs were already unique - as long as the productA name is relevant, unique and descriptive then it probably doesn't warrant too much time changing things.
I'd suggest keeping the same-url/product structure and ensure your other on-page SEO is tight and focus on trying to create some new unique interesting content to go with your products to make them stand out. Maybe pictures / stories of some of your furniture in the home environment or something along those lines
Cheers
Simon
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
-
Organic search traffic down 60% since 8/1/18\. What now?
I have a small health & fitness blog, and my Google search traffic suddenly dropped 60% around August 1 (I've attempted to link an image). My rank has dropped for 86 keywords. I have no manual penalty, so I'm guessing I was affected by the algorithm change. My technical skills are VERY limited. I've tried to find answers on my own, but every time I try to "fix" something, I only seem to make it worse. I do seem to have some structural/performance issues with my site (e.g., lots of 404 errors from uninstalled plugins and unwanted permalinks). I asked my server for assistance (I used managed Wordpress hosting), and they said they couldn't help. As you can imagine, this is quite devastating, and I have no clue where to go from here. I don't know if I'm allowed to link to my site here, but it's mommyrunsit dot com. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks. Sharon 0lPu4wY
Reporting & Analytics | | RoniFaida1 -
Gets traffic on both domain.dk and domain.dk/default.asp
Hi. Im runnning a couple of sites. And in my analytics/webmastertool I get both traffic on domain.dk and domain.dk/default.asp which are both essentially the same page. I'm pretty sure it would be better, if I somehow could make the default.asp "redirect" to "/". I dont wanna loose the linkjuice thou. Any smart suggestions for an easy fix? /Kasper
Reporting & Analytics | | KasperGJ0 -
Parenthesis in URL?
For some reason, we have some URLs on our site with parentheses in them such as somesite.com/used-this(that)What will parenthesis do to the ranking of those pages?
Reporting & Analytics | | CFSSEO0 -
Feedburner stats show drop in multiple feeds from 6/21/13 to 6/22\. Anyone else seen the same?
Client has 3 RSS feeds in Feedburner, and they saw a drop in subscribers from 6/21 to 6/22. Wondering if anyone else has saw a drop recently. Obviously, this could be the results of multiple people cleaning up their feeds, but it appears too coincidental. Has anyone heard if there are any recent issues with Feedburner tracking?
Reporting & Analytics | | DanaLookadoo0 -
Core audience, daily / weekly uniques
In Google analytics or site catalyst, is there anyway to target IP addresses to see how many of my daily uniques are daily, weekly, monthly and what % are just 'tourists'/'one-offs'? My site is a local news site... Or is there another way to find this info. I am trying to work out what my core audience is (that keeps coming back every day or every week). Kind regards
Reporting & Analytics | | MirandaP0 -
How do I find backlinks and/or SERPs for a subdomain
I realize this is probably a very basic question but if I want to find backlinks to a sub-domain of my site, how would I do that? Also, if I wanted to see what search terms were bringing traffic to one specific page of my site, how would I do that?
Reporting & Analytics | | aarnswife0 -
Setting up Google Analytics default URL
If someone has set: the default url in Google Analytics to a non-www address (http://mysite.com) then placed the UA tracking script from that GA account within the CMS framework of the website... ... and then set the permanent 301 redirect in the htaccess file to redirect to the www address (http://www.mysite.com). How less accurrate will my GA analytics measurements be considering the default url within GA is non-www and the permanent 301 redirect in htacess is to the www-address? Anyone know how reliable GA reports are until the default url in GA analytics is changed to match what is the redirected url in htaccess file? _Cindy
Reporting & Analytics | | CeCeBar0 -
The brainstorm of finding the reason of the URL decrease on original search result and the procedures of fixing the problem?
Hi guys: i just any one have some idea of how to find the mainly reasons of the listed position on google search original result decrease and the procedures of fixing those problem. Appreciate for any feedback. David
Reporting & Analytics | | skyten0