Include placename in URL, or not?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I'm wondering whether to put placename in URL or not. This is for a hotel so it's very focused on the county.
I have loads of sub pages along the lines of www.hotelname.com/short-breaks-somerset www.hotelname.com/eat-out-somerset and so on but I was wondering whether that placename element would help or hinder.
For example, may want to rank for short breaks in other searches (not just those seeking short breaks in Somerset) and was wondering whether the somerset bit may actually hinder this in the future.
Also noticed Somerset is mentioned in nearly all of the page urls through the site. Perhaps this is a bit spammy and just not neccesary. I can include the address of the hotel on every page anyway.
What do you think? Thanks in advance for your help Luke
-
Thanks Tom - thanks for nudging me in the right direction and Somerset is just brilliant. Haven't actually been there before but... wow. Drinking a nice glass of organic Somerset Cider as I type (slurp!).
-
Hey Luke
I say promote Somerset more and more, it's lovely there!
I think from an SEO perspective having Somerset in your place name is unlikely to have a negative effect. It's not really stuffing a keyword in there, it's more being descriptive, so I wouldn't worry there.
Now for other non-Somerset terms, it could be having a slight SEO effect. There's a slight correlation between URLs with keywords in them and higher rankings, so one could argue that if Google is able to associate your hotel/breaks with Somerset, it might disassociate them with hotel breaks in say Blackpool. The URL may not serve the user intent (although I'd say your on-page content would dictate this far more).
What I do think would be a greater problem, however, is the click-through and conversion rate of users looking for breaks but not in the somerset area. If they see your site in the search engines and see Somerset in the URL, it might discourage them for clicking. Similarly, if they're on your site and see it, they might not think it's relevant and leave.
More so for the user experience rather than the SEO ramifications, I'd consider changing the URL, if this is relevant.
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
-
Do we lose Backlinks and Domain Authority of URL when we change domain Name?
Have 1 performing domain (Monthly - 4M visitor ) now we want to change domain name ( Brand name like SEOMOZ to Moz ). I have general knowledge about domain changing prevention tips like 301 redirection and other thing. My concern is about backlinks and DA. How can I prevent any lose from SEO Point of view. (backlink lose) Do I need to change all backlink form source or redirection is enough to get all reference traffic from that backlinks?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Duplicate content warning: Same page but different urls???
Hi guys i have a friend of mine who has a site i noticed once tested with moz that there are 80 duplicate content warnings, for instance Page 1 is http://yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html the warning page is http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html another example Page 1 http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/ same second page http://yourdigitalfile.com i noticed that the whole website is like the nealry every page has another version in a different url?, any ideas why they dev would do this, also the pages that have received the warnings are not redirected to the newer pages you can go to either one??? thanks very much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ydf0 -
Vanity URLs Canonicalization
Hi, So right now my vanity URLs have a lot more links than my regular homepage. They 301 redirect to the homepage but I'm thinking of canonicalizing the homepage, as well as the mobile page, to the vanity URL. Currently some of my sites have a vanity URL in a SERP and some do not. This is my way of nudging google to list them all as vanity but thought I would get everyone's opinion first. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn1 -
URL Shortners Question
Does anyone know if there are any URL shortners that track when googlebot visits them? I want to know when googlebot visits a shortened link that does NOT got to a URL I control. Any ideas would be much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Does Trade Mark in URL matter to Google
Hello community! We are planning to clean up TM and R in the URLs on the website. Google has indexed these pages but some TM pages are have " " " instead displaying in URL from SERP. What's your thoughts on a "spring cleaning" effort to remove all TM and R and other unsafe characters in URLs? Will this impact indexed pages and ranking etc? Thank you! b.dig
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b.digi0 -
Removing/ Redirecting bad URL's from main domain
Our users create content for which we host on a seperate URL for a web version. Originally this was hosted on our main domain. This was causing problems because Google was seeing all these different types of content on our main domain. The page content was all over the place and (we think) may have harmed our main domain reputation. About a month ago, we added a robots.txt to block those URL's in that particular folder, so that Google doesn't crawl those pages and ignores it in the SERP. We now went a step further and are now redirecting (301 redirect) all those user created URL's to a totally brand new domain (not affiliated with our brand or main domain). This should have been done from the beginning, but it wasn't. Any suggestions on how can we remove all those original URL's and make Google see them as not affiliated with main domain?? or should we just give it the good ol' time recipe for it to fix itself??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | redcappi0 -
URL structure: 301 redirect or leave as is?
Hello, My website, www.coloringbookfun.com is very old and authoritative, but the URL structure is terrible. If you check out some of our subcategories such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda and individual printables such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda/imagepages/image2.html You can see that they aren't optimized. I am curious to know the pros and cons of fixing the URL structure and 301ing them to the new optimized url. Will 301ing lose authority and backlinks for the sites pages? Does optimizing the url structure outweigh losing the authority/backlinks?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Is it still valuable to place content in subdirectories to represent hierarchy or is it better to have every URL off the root?
Is it still valuable to place content in subdirectories to represent hierarchy on the site or is it better to have every URL off the root? I have seen websites structured both ways. It seems having everything off the root would dilute the value associated with pages closest to the homepage. Also, from a user perspective, I see the value in a visual hierarchy in the URL.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | belcaro19860