Will changing a subdirectory name negatively effect local ranking?
-
We submitted a group of 50+ franchise stores into UBL to fulfill directory listings back in September. We are now looking at changing the some of the URL structure to include city names.
Example: website.com/store/store-name(not city)
to website.com/location/city-store-name
Will changing the subdirectory and resubmitting to the directory aggregators negatively effect their search results?
Thanks,
Jake
-
My pleasure, Jake, and good luck with the changes.
-
Good call on the 301s Miriam.
After the url site changes, we WILL be resubmitting to all the directories, G+, etc. Thanks for the additional feedback!
-
Thanks for the feedback Matt. My hunch is that short term there may be a bump, but long term having the city name of the business in the url structure could only help.
With all the flux at Google+ Local/Places and lack of support, it would seem the more obvious you could make your location across the page, the better.
-
Hi Jake, Ideally, if I were building a local business website from scratch, I would set up the page URLs like this: website.com/city-services Your example of what you want to change the names to look fine, too, so long as you are going to 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones. If you don't, you will lose any links and citations you may have built or achieved for those pages. Also, if this is going to affect the URLs linked from, say, Google+ Local to pages on the website, you'll to change the URLs in Google+ (or other directories) to the new URLs to avoid confusion. All this said, I'm on the same page with what Matt said about this. It's possible for pages with totally lousy URLs to do just fine, in my experience, but if you have a choice, it's nice to write them nicely.
-
This is a pretty common trick among the photographers I've worked with. I can say from what I've seen, there's no benefit to having a keyword in the link like that, but as far as changing, no, it shouldn't hurt you. Short term there may be some movement but that could be positive or negative, depending on about a billion other factors (how relevant to the cities are the page, are the other pages on the site, etc.) Google could love the changes, could hate them. From our experience, it's usually worth just setting it up how you want and letting Google figure it out from there.
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
-
Frequent Blog Content-Effective in Improving Ranking?
To what extent will posting quality blog posts 2 to 3 times per week have the following effects: 1. Improve ranking for specific keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Create backlinks to our website
3. Increase MOZ domain authority
4. Increase organic search traffic Assume that the blog posts are geared towards answering user inquiries and are also posted on our social media accounts. Would such an approach be better than engaging in a link building campaign, in the sense that the links will be created organically by users that want to link to our site? Thanks,
Alan0 -
New domain or subdirectory?
I noticed my domain authority has dropped slightly in the recent update, and it has me re-thinking a strategy for a website I just recently launched. I purchased the domain name kansasisbeautiful.com about a year ago and have been working on building it for most of that time. Earlier in August, I went ahead and launched it. However, towards the end of the development of the website, I decided to just put it in a subdirectory of my parent company (my photography business) at mickeyshannon.com/kansas and redirected the kansasisbeautiful.com domain to the subdirectory. mickeyshannon.com is my photography business website. The Kansas website has it's own distinct design, but is powered completely by my photography. I created it for a few purposes, including promoting tourism to the state of Kansas and to publish a book on Kansas travel next year, but one of it's main goals is also to help sell my photography prints. I decided to put it in a subdirectory (mickeyshannon.com/kansas) as I had hoped it might drive more traffic into buying photo prints if it lived on my main website. However, I've been re-thinking my strategy and have been wondering if I'm competing against myself too much. Many of my photography prints have the name of a location in them and have their own URL per photo (for example: "Flint Hills Spring Sunrise" is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com/photo/flint-hills-spring-sunset/). It makes me wonder if the new Kansas travel website page for the Flint Hills (http://www.mickeyshannon.com/kansas/flint-hills/) is competing for that keyword. Would I be better moving mickeyshannon.com/kansas to kansasisbeautiful.com? I was worried having so many backlinks back to my photography site would send up red flags with Google as if the kansasisbeautiful.com website was just a spammy website created to push traffic to mickeyshannon.com when it really has it's own purpose. Any thoughts on whether using the domain name or keeping it at the subdomain level is better? Hopefully that made sense. Thanks, Mickey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VSphoto0 -
Ranking with subdomain - Urgent
Does anyone have any experience if it is possible to get a website ranking on a subdomain? I'm trying out a business idea and need to keep costs to an absolute minimum. I have a site which I designed in wix.com they give a free subdomain and I want to know if there's any chance of getting it to rank Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
No Google Ranking..yet
I have een working on my site for soem time. Trying to take the right steps to achieve good ranking in the long run and present the information we need to showcase to prospective clients. After several months I still see no ranking at all and I'm wondering if its becasue the front page is using a design similar to a one page website design? If anyone can provide some insight I would appreciate it. Even the smallest nudge i nthe right direction. We are also developing some new content for a blog and expanded written content for our services page. http://thatworksdesign.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bvrettski0 -
Ranking Above sub-domains
So I work for a company that has a very successful affiliate that operates under a third level domain name such as "region.company.com". Their SEO practices are very good and they rank highly in keyword searches. However "company.com" does not even though it is not a subdomain. Even after optimizing the company.com's pages etc, the regional sub domain ranks much higher for keywords and the main company fails to rank at all. Is Google discounting the main company's page? Is it a matter of trust or time? or is it something else? How can I get Google to prioritize the main company website rather than a lower level domain affiliate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resolute0 -
Many changes carried out - Caused a rankings dip one week on?
Hi all! Last week various changes were carried out on a website which has large traffic daily.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie
The changes included; Re-structure of product meta titles ~500 Re-structure of product meta description ~500 Canonical link included on the majority of pages ~600 Meta details have only been changed mildly Title has gone from
Name | Product Code | Category | Company Name
To
Name | Category | Collection | Company Name
IF the title is shorter than 62 characters, the price gets added in.
Name | Category | Collection | Price | Company Name Descriptions have been cut shortIF description is over 156 characters the word on the limit is cut off and replaced with ... Canonical LinksReasoning for adding a canonical link for each product was to point Google in the right direction. Upper and Lower case within the URL are reachable .aspx / .html at the end of each page Canonical link added in the meta directing to a lower case version of the URL. Rankings have been reduced across various keywords, however a few have had a positive impact. Would you say this is a dip before a mild rise, or something I've done is harming the rankings and needs to be reversed? I'd appreciate any advice given. Many Thanks0 -
Dramatic Ranking Changes
Hi, My website is ranked on the 2nd page of Google for the /ncr. Last week suddenly it climbed up to the first page and I let my boss know about it with a quite enthusiasm and happiness 🙂 Then my boss didn't look at it on that day and next day our site was on the second page again and still is. Now I kind of lost reputation in the office, and people start questioning my comments. It wasn't a delusion but I would like to know what it was. No one does any SEO for this 10 years old site, and I've just started an SEO campaign about 1,5 months ago. And I really thought this is it, we are on the first page. But now we are back in to the 2nd page. Is waiting for couple days or weeks to Google to settle right approach for such cases? Or it was just a random bounce or coincidence? Never seen such thing, so I'm quite curious about your opinions or experience if you have.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nunobaronio0 -
What Should I Do With My URL Names?
I release property on my blog each week, and it has come to the point we will get property in the same area as we have had in the past. So, I name my URL /blah-blah-blah-[area of property]/ for the first property in that area right. Now I get a different property in that same area and the URL will have to be named /blah-blah-blah-[area of property]-2/. Now I'm not sure if this is a major issue or not, but I'm sure there must be a better way than this, and I don't really want to take down our past properties - unless you can give me good reason too, of course? So before I start getting URLs like this: /blah-blah-blah-[area of property]-2334343534654/ (well, ok, maybe not that bad! But you get my point) I wanted to see what everyones opinion on it is 🙂 Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonathanRolande0