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.
Post url not matching with post title ( wordpress)
-
I have this site called searchoflife.com on which I have noticed the post urls are not matching with the post title. For Example:Post Title - A Dialogue With NaturePost URL - http://searchoflife.com/dialogue-nature-2013-09-12 Words like 'A' and 'with' are not present in the post URL. This has been the trend since a few days. After investigating I found out that it was due to my plugin SEO ultimate which is actually creating post slugs automatically for the post urls. So my question is whether it is advisable to use post slugs instead of the full post url. Does it affect the SERPS for my site?
-
Hello Again,
Last night I searched a few keywords and noticed a post which is ranking on the first place at first position. Now this post is having the post slug instead of the entire URL. Here is the keyword
liberation from innate darkness - 1st position
empathy is the liberation - 5th position
Post Title - Empathy is the liberation from Innate Darkness
Post URL - http://searchoflife.com/empathy-liberation-innate-darkness-2013-09-02
Also I checked on my localhost after disabling the slug optimizer. It seems that wordpress is automatically redirecting to the new URL so it won't be a problem to change the older post slug URLS yo complete URLs. But I feel I won't touch those posts which are already having good rankings with post slugs. Any suggestions?
-
I haven't thoroughly checked the newer posts as such. Unfortunately when I noticed this change it had already started and I thought it to be an update of Wordpress 3.6. Wordpress it seems has its own post slug since quite sometime. But incidently the update of SEO ultimate plugin too coincided with the wordpress update. So I wasn't sure. Later on another site I noticed the same type of behaviour which was using SEO Yoast plugin. So I don't know why all the top SEO plugins are automatically switching to this. I did search on Google regarding this but haven't found a comprehensive answer.
-
How are your rankings and more importantly traffic generated by these posts doing? You are right you need to be sure before taking this action and to be honest I think there is a good chance that the difference will be negligible even though I think we both agree that we would prefer the full post title URL. If we strip it back to a very base level then you are getting your most important keywords in the URL which is helping your page relevancy so why make this extra work for yourself.
-
I too am not that comfortable with the post slugs personally. But now that there are already a decent amount of posts (More than 50) in that format which are indexed on Google. If I do disable the post slug option I would then have to change all my urls to the post title (i.e if it really does hamper SERPS), then will have to redirect all those URLS to the new URLs. So need to be sure enough to take this action.
Also one of my posts with the keyword 'astrobiological approach' when searched on Google ranks first in the search results. But if you notice that particular url is having the entire post title. However I'm not sure whether the URL itself had a role in the ranking. Please guide me. Thanks.
-
Hi - I tend to always set the urls to be the full post title. You will also notice that the likes of Moz does this as well if you look at this post for instance. Your plugin is trying to be clever as there is thought that having too many hyphens and words in your url will dilute the effectiveness of your main keywords once you start going over 4 or 5 words, depending where the keywords occur in the title. I believe Matt Cutts addressed this in a webmaster video many moons ago and I think the main conclusion was that having too many hyphens in your URL may look a little spammy to searchers and put them off clicking on your result in the SERPs. However nowadays this is a common practice and I don''t think this has negative impact on click through rates from the SERPs. If I were you I would look at my URL matching my post title personally. Small words such as A and with help to add context to your page contents in my opinion.
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
-
Correct robots.txt for WordPress
Hi. So I recently launched a website on WordPress (1 main page and 5 internal pages). The main page got indexed right off the bat, while other pages seem to be blocked by robots.txt. Would you please look at my robots file and tell me what‘s wrong? I wanted to block the contact page, plugin elements, users’ comments (I got a discussion space on every page of my website) and website search section (to prevent duplicate pages from appearing in google search results). Looks like one of the lines is blocking every page after ”/“ from indexing, even though everything seems right. Thank you so much. FzSQkqB.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | AslanBarselinov1 -
Page Title Length
Hi Gurus, I understand that it is a good practice is to use 50-60 characters for the a page title length. Google appends my brand name to the end of each title (15 characters including spaces) it index. Do I need to count what google adds as part of the maximum recommended length? i.e.
On-Page Optimization | | SunnyMay
is the maximum 50-60 characters + the 15 characters brand name Google adds to the end of the title or 50-60 including the addition? Many thanks!
Lev0 -
City Name in URL structure
I have a client whose site was built when they only served one market, and they now have that city in the majority of their URLs. I'm suggesting we redo the URL structure to remove this location from the main URLs (think homepage, about, etc.) since they have now expanded to three markets. They are seeing a lot of great organic traffic in that original market but are struggling in the new ones they've added so I'm helping to optimize their site. How critical do you think that removing that location from the URL is? I know we would need to implement 301 redirects, but wanted to get thoughts on this.
On-Page Optimization | | maghanlinchpinsales0 -
URL Structure on Category Pages
Hi, Currently, we having the following URL Structure o our product pages: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/283/All_Products.html Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/4/Clothing.html Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/product/LOAD-HE-WOM/Assorted-High-End-Women-Clothing-Lots.html?cid=4 Since we are going to use another frontend system, we are thinking about re-working on this URL Structure, using something like this: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/ Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/product-title/ I understand this is better for SEO and user experience. However, we already have good traffic on the current URL Structure. Should we use same left-side filters on Category Pages as in All Products Page? Since we are using Faceted Navigation, when users filter the Category (e.g. Clothing) they will see same page as Clothing Category Page. Is that an issue for Duplicate Content? Since we are a wholesale company - I understand is using "/wholesale/products/" in URL for all product pages a good idea? If so, should we avoid word "wholesale" in product-title to avoid repeated word in URL? For us, SKU in URL helps the company employees and maybe some clients identify the link. However, what do you think of using the SEO-friendly product-title, and 301 redirect it to www.viatrading.com/BRTA-LN-DISHRACKS/, so 1st link is only used by company members and Canonicalized 2nd is the only one seen by general public? Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | viatrading10 -
Meta Title Pipes and Spacing
I've been doing optimization on a clients website and want to make sure I'm maximizing my characters. Does anyone have any feedback on the spacing in between the pipes ( | ) ? IE: Internet Marketing Company | Denver SEO | Brand Name Do the spaces before and after the pipes play a role in whether the search engines can distinguish the keyword or is it all considered one word if there is no spaces such as: IE: Internet Marketing Company|Denver SEO|Brand Name Any information will be super helpful. Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | RezStreamSEO0 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0 -
Using commas in the title tag?
Is there a disadvantage/advantage to using commas to separate words in the title tag. Which will be more effective as a title tag: "keyword1 keyword2 - Brand" OR "keyword1, keyword2 - Brand"?
On-Page Optimization | | Audiohype0 -
Post Title - Use the blog's name or not?
In the tile of my post, shoudl I used my blog's name in it at the end or emit the blog name. EX: title of post with keywords | name of blog OR EX: title of post with keywords The site's name is 3 words long, so I'm worrying that those extra words are diluting the keywords in the post's name that I'm trying to target.
On-Page Optimization | | gregalam0