Parent pages

[Richard555]

Hi guys,

A website has many venue pages, for example:

www.example.com/venue/paris

For some reason the parent www.example.com/venue/  is 301 redirecting to a minor page elsewhere on the website.

Should I remove the 301 redirect and then create www.example.com/venue/     page that then links to all the venues?

My thinking is:

• Google will expect there to be a /venue/ 'parent' page

• So if the parent page is redirecting to a minor page elsewhere within the website its telling Google all the venues like paris must be even less important.

Should I do it? Any suggestions from fellow SEOMoz's would be appreciated!

All the best

Richard

[CraigBradford]

Hi Richard, It sounds like the best way to answer your question would be to use an example and think about it from a user point of view.

Let's say you own a hotel site with the following URL structure:

www.example.com/hotels/london  - (in your case this would be your www.example.com/venue/paris page)

If I was a user and I now want to see all hotels, it would make sense that the page www.example.com/hotels/ would show me that. If it doesn't and I get redirected to a less important page I would find that strange. Forgetting Google for a minute it's also not good to put users through an internal redirect as it's slower and if users see the URL change it can confuse them.

To summarize, I would remove the 301 redirect and create a category page as it's better for your users and can have a chance of ranking for a category keyword.

I hope this helps,

Craig

[mememax]

Hi Richard, having the vanue info in the /venue/ folder is definitely the options which makes more sense to both users and google. I think that having that content in the venue folder and then linking to all inner pages is the easiest way to both handle your page and analyse the traffic/conversions delivered by the venue related content.