URL - Well Formed or Malformed

[well-its-1-louder]

Hi Mozzers,

I've been mulling over whether my URLs could benefit a little SEO tweaking. I'd be grateful for your opinion.

For instance, we've a product, a vintage (second hand), red Chanel bag. At the moment the URL is:

www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/2.55-bags/red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag-1362483150

Broken down...

vintage-chanel-bags = this is the main product category, i.e. vintage chanel bags

2.55-bags = is a sub category of the main category above. They are vintage Chanel 2.55 bags, but I've not included 'vintage' again. 2.55 bags are a type of Chanel bag.

red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag = this is the product, the bag

**1362483150 **= this is a unique id, to prevent the possibility of duplicate URLs

As you no doubt can see we target, in particular, the phrase **vintage. **The actual bag / product title is: Vintage Chanel Red 2.55 classic double flap bag 10” / 25cm

With this in mind, would I be better off trying to match the product name with the end of the URL as closely as possible?

So a close match below would involve not repeating 'chanel' again:

www.vintageheirloom.com/chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag

or an exact match below would involve repeating 'chanel':

www.vintageheirloom.com/chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag

This may open up more flexibility to experiment with product terms like second hand, preowned etc.

Maybe this is a bad idea as I'm removing the phrase 'vintage' from the main category. But this logical extension of this looks like keyword stuffing !!

www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/vintage-2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag

Maybe this is over analyzing, but I doubt it?

Thanks for looking.

Kevin

[well-its-1-louder]

Thanks Everett,

Strange, the product on the website appears in two places, on the homepage 'Featured' product, and in the Chanel > 2.55 bags category. When I check both I only see the product name after the .com/.

Thanks for the heads up about restructuring to match the rel canonical, makes perfect sense. I'll be moving over to Wordpress, Woocomerce at some point in the future. I'll look into making the linkable URL neat and tidy as suggested.

Much appreciated...

Kevin

[Everett]

The product I checked (see above) had rel canonical tags that used the first category (though not the second / sub-category). That is different than what you listed as "default" above.

Having the default rel canonical tag be .com/product-name-UniqueID/ is fine too. The important thing here is that you should be consistent. Also realize that using the rel canonical tag like this is sort of a temporary band-aid. Ideally you would be linking to the canonical URL and displaying the canonical URL instead of linking to and displaying the non-canonical URL on the site and relying on the rel canonical tag to "fix" it.

That should be fine for now. At some point in the future you probably want to make .com/product-name-UniqueID the version that gets linked to from elsewhere on the site (such as category pages) and for all other versions of that URL to 301 redirect to it.

[well-its-1-louder]

Hi Everett,

Thank you for your considered response.

Choice wise, I feel fairly constrained by my shopping cart (Opencart, and lack of technical ability !

So am I correct in thinking that Google reads the rel canonical, not what appears in the URL? I've checked the generated rel canonical & by default it takes just the product name, probably as products, as you say, can be in more than 1 category. So I get: www.vintageheirloom.com/red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag-1362483150

As you say this omits the term chanel & vintage.

With no understanding of how to implement your suggestion of putting all products into a 'products' category I think it might be safer for me to leave as is... for now. I'll certainly bear this in mind when I next rebuild the website, all good food for thought.

Thanks!

[Everett]

Hello Mr. Vintage Heirloom,

Takeshi has some great points about priorities, and avoiding keyword stuffing your URLs. I might add, however, that putting category directories in product URLs has two major disadvantages that, in my opinion, usually outweigh the advantage of having those keywords in the URL.

#1 - If the product exists in multiple categories you risk having more than one URL for the product. This can be mitigated with redirects or rel canonical tags, but is still a pain. Here's an example:
http://www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag-1362483150
http://www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/2.55-bags/red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag-1362483150
The bag's URL can be accessed from at least two different URLs (some products could have many more versions) and the canonical tag says that the shorter of the two URLs above is the canonical version. If that is the case the keywords in your /2.55-bags/ directory are useless as a ranking factor for that particular product page since that directory is not in the rel canonical tag.

Yes you can avoid the issues presented by multiple URL versions of the page, and some sites only ever put a product into a single category. However, that does nothing to account for this...

#2 - The deeper your category structure goes the further away from the root your product pages are. I have seen product pages five or six folders deep across entire eCommerce sites because of this. While I don't think the entire site architecture should be completely flat (some sort of taxonomy in the URLs is logical and useful) you don't want your most important pages to be several folders deep either.

I always recommend going with this:
site.com/products/product-name/
Or in your case:

site.com/products/product-name-uniqueID/

Putting the products into the /products/ directory is that level of useful taxonomy I mentioned above. This allows you, for instance, to do a search on Google like (site:domain.com inurl:products) to see how many of your product pages are indexed. The same type of logic is useful when segmenting analytics reports or WMT exports in Excel, among other uses.

Then you don't have to worry about keyword stuffing due to keywords already contained in the category directory portion of the URL.

This is just one person's opinion though. Some may disagree. I just don't find keywords in the URL to be all that important these days compared to other things. It has been spammed to death and thus the importance attributed to that factor has been steadily declining over the years, at least to my observation.

Regarding 301 redirects, they don't really cost you any appreciable amount of pagerank. It truly is negligible as long as you're not going through several redirect hops at once. The key is to make up your mind about your URLs with an eye to the future scalability and useability of the site - and stick with it. One round of redirects will temporarily set you back in the SERPs, but you should bounce back within a couple of weeks (good time of year to do them!) if done correctly.

Good luck!

[TakeshiYoung]

Remember that every keyword you add to your URL decreases the value of every other keyword you have in the URL. You want to include a few keywords in your URL for SEO value, but not so many that it dilutes the value of the other keywords. Also, having an overly long URL is a poor user experience.

So in this case, I would not include the word "vintage" in your URL for a 3rd time, because the SEO value is marginal and it will dilute the value of your other keywords, as well as making an already long URL even longer. And like I said, changing your URL structure will result in a loss of PageRank.

[well-its-1-louder]

Thanks Takeshi,

Good to know. Any harm in adding an additional 'vintage' here to match H2 product name?

www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag...

Or does that look spammy?

[TakeshiYoung]

If you've been running your site for a while, I would recommend against changing your URL structure as 301s do result in some loss of link value, and you will likely see your rankings drop. The URLs you have now aren't bad, so I would focus on higher value activities such as link building. Ultimately, Google weighs offsite factors more highly than a few on-site tweaks.