Please suggest! Overstuffed URLs - to change, or not to change?
-
Hello guys,
We are in doubts about changing URLs on our http://www.fiberscope.net/ store
The site was hit by Google in January and has dropped from top 3 to top 20 for most of its keywords.
Now we're working on some redesign, including removing of over optimized content from it.
It looks like our categories and content pages URLs are overstuffed with keywords. Here is a dilemma. Should we rewrite them and set up 301 redirect or just leave as is?
I look trough the seomoz Q&A and find out that a lot of guys got in troubles after redirecting
PLEASE, Suggest!
-
sure!
-
keep us posted on how this works out for you
-
Thanks for ideas, Jesse
-
just glanced at your backlink profile... you've lost something like 10,000 links over the last week or so. if those were all poison links, that's fantastic for you!
NOW you need to start building quality links or you'll never regain your rankings.
so get out there and do some link building. That's my best advice to you. apart from a redesign and better optimized content.
img alt tags are a problem as Dennis suggested. a quick peek shows one alt tag that says "search" and another that reads "McAfee SECURE sites help keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams"
These are both perfectly wrong examples and should be fixed.
Also, clean up that HTML it's gonna be difficult to manage in such a cluster like that. (my own personal gripe.. you may work differently than I)
-
Thanks Dennis,
And you got it right - we received a message from Google with a warning about "silly" links
We have enough links from very trusted, industry related sources but paid junk damage it
We've stopped buying links, but what can we do with existing ones we bought? I think we have to wait 2-3 months and resubmit to Google?
-
I suggest making sure if that is really your problem.
Fix the minor details, alt tags, remove your meta keywords, fix your sitemap
Dropping to Top 20 doesn't really look like a penalty, more like there are other pages that are better than you.
Take a look at your webmaster tools first for problems and fix those.
Check your keyword average rankings in there and look at your impressions on when you dropped
I also suggest looking your links...its a mix of Russian and sape links
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
-
Canonical URL Tag
I have 3 websites with same content, I want to add Canonical tag to my main website. Is this also important to mentioned other duplicate URL in canonical tag in main website? or just need to just add
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
SEO is changing - how has your day to day changed?
I'm sure we all read on our alternatives to Google Reader that SEO is changing - "here's what we must do to be relevant in 2014". I find these articles boring and uninformative. I suspect I'm not alone. The reason I'm not their biggest fan is because I feel like I've invested 10 minutes into an article that I have no actual guidance from. Therefore, I thought I'd ask the real SEO's, you guys, what has actually changed for you? Are you now not creating content with the aim of getting links? If you run a commercial website, what are you doing different to rank your product pages - directly or indirectly? Please share with the group. I'm sure many like me are still brainstorming and creating content they think will grab people's attention and gain them links, whilst also pushing their Facebook, Twitter, Youtube profiles, etc etc. What has changed about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | purpleindigo0 -
Should /node/ URLs be 301 redirect to Clean URLs
Hi All! We are in the process of migrating to Drupal and I know that I want to block any instance of /node/ URLs with my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing them. My question is, should we set 301 redirects on the /node/ versions of the URLs to redirect to their corresponding "clean" URL, or should the robots.txt blocking and canonical link element be enough? My gut tells me to ask for the 301 redirects, but I just want to hear additional opinions. Thank you! MS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
Google tagged URL an overly-dynamic URL?
I'm reviewing my campaign, and spotted the overly-dynamic URL box showing a few links. Reviewing it, they are my Google Tagged URLs (utm_source, utm_medium_utm_campaign etc) I've turned some internal links to Google Tagged URLs but should these cause concern?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
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:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
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-n1234 Some 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-d1234 Some ideas for the forum URLs:
http://forum.domain.com/topic-title-shorter-t1234
http://forum.domain.com/topic/topic-title-shorter-1234 What 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.0 -
Should I change wordpress urls?
Should I change my wordpress permalinks to include the keyword? For examples at the minute my url is http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is it better to be http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-bands/wedding-singer. 'home' is not relevant so surely 'live-bands' would be better? If I change the urls won't I lose 'link juice' as external links will all point to a url that no longer exists? Or will wordpress automatically redirect the old url to the new one? Finally, if I should change the url as described how do I do it on wordpress? I can only see how to edit the last bit of the url and not the middle bit.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
I do a lot of on page SEO... I was wondering some basic tactics / strategies for link building? Please provide only WHITE HAT suggestions! Thank You ;)
Please keep in mind google's announcement on links recently.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | entourage2120 -
Googlebot crawling partial URLs
Hi guys, I've checked my email this morning and I've got a number of 404 errors over the weekend where Google has tried to crawl some of my existing pages but not found the full URL. Instead of hitting 'domain.com/folder/complete-pagename.php' it's hit 'domain.com/folder/comp'. This is definitely Googlebot/2.1; http://www.google.com/bot.html (66.249.72.53) but I can't find where it would have found only the partial URL. It certainly wasn't on the domain it's crawling and I can't find any links from external sites pointing to us with the incorrect URL. GoogleBot is doing the same thing across a single domain but in different sub-folders. Having checked Webmaster Tools there aren't any hard 404s and the soft ones aren't related and haven't occured since August. I'm really confused as to how this is happening.. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | panini0