Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What is the best URL structure for categories?
-
A client's site currently uses the URL structure:
www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname%
Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this:
Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons.
So I'm left with a few options:
- Remove the category from the URL
- Flatten the category hierarchy
- Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic.
- Leave it as it is
What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
-
Or
5. Shorten the keywords in the url post ie
title: Some Post titles are quite long as they are long tail terms
url: /parent-category/child-category/post-titles-long/
-
Thanks Tom, yes it's Wordpress - I do manually edit the slug to take out stop words and irrelevant words but sometimes its just not enough.
If I use digital marketing as an example, I may end up having:
How long is too long? No idea!
I'll just Snapchat Rand and ask him...
p.s. (Sorry if contentwhiz is you!)
-
Hi there,
I'm assuming you're using Wordpress? I think having the categories in the URL is a must if you're trying to rank and the category is one of your keywords for your website.
Personally, if I was having trouble with long URL's for the longer post titles (e.g. How to gain 1000 genuine followers on twitter, quickly and free == domain.com/social-media-tutorials/twitter/How-to-gain-1000-genuine-followers-on-twitter-quickly-and-free") I would probably remove certain generic words from the URL that Google wouldn't even search for anyway, so that my URL structure would become: domain.com/social-media/twitter/how-to/gain-1000-genuine-followers-twitter-free or words to that effect.
You are able to change the URL of the post (within Wordpress) as you Publish your post (under the post title field).
Hope this is of some help!
Tom
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
-
My url disappeared from Google but Search Console shows indexed. This url has been indexed for more than a year. Please help!
Super weird problem that I can't solve for last 5 hours. One of my urls: https://www.dcacar.com/lax-car-service.html Has been indexed for more than a year and also has an AMP version, few hours ago I realized that it had disappeared from serps. We were ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When I perform a search "site:dcacar.com " the url is no where to be found on all 5 pages. But when I check my Google Console it shows as indexed I requested to index again but nothing changed. All other 50 or so urls are not effected at all, this is the only url that has gone missing can someone solve this mystery for me please. Thanks a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
URL Structure & Best Practice when Facing 4+ Sub-levels
Hi. I've spent the last day fiddling with the setup of a new URL structure for a site, and I can't "pull the trigger" on it. Example: - domain.com/games/type-of-game/provider-name/name-of-game/ Specific example: - arcade.com/games/pinball/deckerballs/starshooter2k/ The example is a good description of the content that I have to organize. The aim is to a) define url structure, b) facilitate good ux, **c) **create a good starting point for content marketing and SEO, avoiding multiple / stuffing keywords in urls'. The problem? Not all providers have the same type of game. Meaning, that once I get past the /type-of-game/, I must write a new category / page / content for /provider-name/. No matter how I switch the different "sub-levels" around in the url, at one point, the provider-name doesn't fit as its in need of new content, multiple times. The solution? I can skip "provider-name". The caveat though is that I lose out on ranking for provider keywords as I don't have a cornerstone content page for them. Question: Using the URL structure as outlined above in WordPress, would you A) go with "Pages", or B) use "Posts"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan-Louis0 -
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?
I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Product or Shop in URL
What do you think is better for seo and for sale, I am using woo-ecommerce for health products website. websitename.com/product/keyword OR websitename.com/shop/keyword
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MasonBaker0 -
Easy way to change wordpress category titles. Currently categories are appearing with the same title?!
I'm working on a wordpress adult dating review site and have started to set up categories for each of my main keywords. I have also started to add sub categories by county and town and so far have done so for the counties of 'Lincolnshire' and 'Derbyshire'. The problem is though that for each of my subcategories the page titles are appearing the same. For example: www.mysite.com/category/online-dating/lincolnshire/spalding (root category online dating) shows the title as 'Spalding'. www.mysite.com/category/adult-dating/lincolnshire/spalding also has the title 'Spalding' even though it's root category is different (adult dating). It's probably easier to go to http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com to see how it's set up. If you click in the category text in the top menu and navigate to dating/derbyshire/alfreton for example and then adult dating/derbyshire/alfreton you'll notice the page titles are the same. I use all in one SEO pack and have rewrite titles checked with category titles set to %category_title% | %blog_title%. I also use category SEO updater. In order to prevent duplicate content issues how can I simply make the title of each category category root title/category subtitle(county)/category subtitle 2(town). The title of each category page would then read for example Online Dating Lincolnshire Spalding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Overly-Dynamic URL
Hi, We have over 5000 pages showing under Overly-Dynamic URL error Our ecommerce site uses Ajax and we have several different filters like, Size, Color, Brand and we therefor have many different urls like, http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Pumps.html?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all http://www.dellamoda.com/designer-handbags.html?use_selected_filter=Y&option=manufacturer%3A&page3 Could we use the robots.txt file to disallow these from showing as duplicate content? and do we need to put the whole url in there? like: Disallow: /*?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y if not how far into the url should be disallowed? So far we have added the following to our robots,txt Disallow: /?sort=title Disallow: /?use_selected_filter=Y Disallow: /?sort=price Disallow: /?clearall=Y Just not sure if they are correct. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,Kami
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dellamoda2 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120