Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Totally flat URL structure

Web Design

2179

McTaggart last edited by

Hi Mozzers! I've just been viewing a website with a flat URL structure - the site has a definite structure - with various sections - and yet the URL structure doesn't reflect this...

The developer tells me this is purely for SEO purposes! Would be interested in your thoughts...
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
BrightHealth @McTaggart last edited by

Glad it shed some insight on the topic for you! Best of luck, Luke!
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
McTaggart @BrightHealth last edited by

Thanks v much for your useful feedback inc that brilliant conversation - all makes more sense now
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
BrightHealth last edited by

Unless the site is very small, you will definitely want to have (at a minimum) sub categories within the top-level pages. It's better for ui to have the site structured in a logical sense.

Your dev is right though, the closer a page is to the root the better it is for SEO. However, it is the ever present line we must straddle between building for SEO and for users. In my experience, the more you flatten, the higher the number of pages you must have on each URL.

Here's a great conversation on the subject on Webmaster World.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

URL Structure's Effect on SEO

Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
Web Design | | maxcarnage

0
301 Redirect Issue for URL with # and !

Hi All, We had a WIX website and now moved to Wordpress. I m having issue while doing redirecting from old URL to new URL. Example: Old Url: http://www.firsttraffic.com.au/#!traffic-management/ccfn New Url: http://www.firsttraffic.com.au/our-services/traffic-management/ I tried different wordpress plugin but nothing works. I m thinking its due to the # . But How can I to redirection for URL like this . Thanks
Web Design | | emarketexperts

0
URLs appear in Google Webmaster Tools that I can't find on my own site?!?

Hi, I have a Magento e-commerce site (clothing) and when I had a look through some of the sections in Google Webmaster Tools I found URLs that I can't find on my site. For example, a product url maybe http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/ which is fine. In that product there maybe three sizes of the product (Small, Medium, Large) and for some reason Googlebot is sometimes finding a url like: http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/1202/ has been found and when clicked on is a live url (Status code: 200) with is one of the sizes (medium). However I have ran a site crawl in Screaming Frog and other crawl tests and can't seem to find where Googlebot is finding these URLs. I think I need to: 1. Find how Googlebot is finding these urls? 2. Find out how to keep out of index (e.g. robots.txt, canonical etc.... Any help would be much appreciated and I'm happy to share the URL with members if they think they can have a look and help with this problem. I can share specific URLs which might make the issue seem clearer, let me know? Thanks, Darrell
Web Design | | clickyleap

0
Changing URL's for a website redesign

Hi folks, We're redesigning our website and looking for some advice on how changing our URL's would affected our rankings. If the page URLs are changing how can we carry out redirects to avoid losing any SEO rank? Thanks, Ross
Web Design | | Will_Craig

0
Flat vs. Silo Site Architecture, What's Better

I'm in the midst of converting a fairly large website (500+ pages) into WordPress as a content management system. I know that there are two schools of thought regarding site architecture: Those who believe that everything should be categorized, I.E.- website.com/shoes/reebok/running People who believe that the less clicks it takes from the homepage the better. As it stands, our current site has a completely flat architecture, with landing pages being added randomly to the root, I.E.- website.com/affordable-shoes-in-louisville-ky I'm beginning to think that there is a gray area with this. I spoke to someone who says that you should never have a page more than 2 categories/subfolders deep. But if we plan on adding a lot of content doesn't it make sense to set the site up into many categories so we can set a good foundation for adding massive amounts of content. Also, will 301 redirecting to the new structure cause us to lose rankings for certain terms? Any help here is appreciated.
Web Design | | C-Style

0
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?

Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic

0
How WP Themes work with Navigation Structure for SEO and JQuery Headers?

I am trying to find the best WP Theme for our company. I noticed most of them do not offer a left hand side navigation on the home pages, and usually are on the right side on the inside pages. I always thought that Home Page links were very important for SEO. Currenly we have a left drop down navigation with all of our product catagories, keyword optimized. The structure follows for all the pages. Is this not as important to Search Engines anymore? Is it better to have a products link, to all the products and then the inside pages, have just a navigation bar, for that particular catagory? This seems to be very common on all the templates i am seeing. I also noticed, and really like the JQueary Tabs. I would use this for displaying, PDFs and Specifications Charts. Also, some home page images are using a jquery slider with some text, linking to a page. Is Jquery the new javascript and do search engines see what is in the code? I also noticed they all have footers that have links and some other information. Is this a SEO must have?
Web Design | | hfranz

0
Will my site structure provide decent SEO?

We have an ASP.NET MVC website with a view that can dynamically display each product we offer. The product name is hyphenated in the URL, and this is what we’re using to pull the product from the database. So an example URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida/Sample-Product-Name We have another view that dynamically lists the products offered for each state. This page would contain links to the URL for each product offered in that state. The URL for Florida would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida We want to make sure that when we enter a new product into the database, the product is indexed by Google the next time our site is crawled. I know that Google will crawl through the links in our website, so the new product should get indexed as long as we have a link to it. In this case, the link will be on the view that lists the products for the corresponding state. I have 2 questions: 1) Is my understanding correct that Google will index the product page as long as it can find a link to it somewhere in my site? 3) To get Google to index each URL for content that is generated dynamically from a database, is having links in my site for each URL the only way to do it? Is there something we can do with the site map? Thanks in advance everyone! -Alex
Web Design | | dbuckles

0