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.
All page files in root? Or to use directories?
-
We have thousands of pages on our website; news articles, forum topics, download pages... etc - and at present they all reside in the root of the domain /.
For example:
/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/what-is-best-addon-t3360.htmlWe are considering moving over to a new URL system where we use directories. For example, the above URLs would be the following:
/images/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/forums/what-is-best-addon-t3360.htmlWould we have any benefit in using directories for SEO purposes? Would our current system perhaps mean too many files in the root / flagging as spammy? Would it be even better to use the following system which removes file endings completely and suggests each page is a directory:
/images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/If so, what would be better: /images/aosta-valley/6816/ or /images/6816/aosta-valley/
Just looking for some clarity to our problem!
Thank you for your help guys!
-
To my knowledge there hasn't been a definitive conclusion on this one.
The general advice as I know it seems to be: they are equally good, pick one, and make sure the other one (with slash if you choose to go for 'without slash' or vice versa) redirects to the chosen one (to avoid duplicate content).
-
I would personally place the keywords at the end for clarity. It indeed seems unnatural to have the id as the final part of the URL. Even if that does indeed cost you a tiny bit of 'keyword power', I would glady sacrifice that in exchange for a more user-friendly URL.
Limiting the amount of words in the URL does indeed make it look slightly less spammy, but slightly less user friendly as well. I guess this is just one of those 'weigh the pros/cons and decide for yourself'. Just make sure the URLs don't get rediculously long.
-
OK, so I have taken it upon myself to now have our URLs as follows:
/news/853/free-flight-simulator/
Anything else gets 301'd to the correct URL. /news/853/free-flight-simulator would be 301'd to /news/853/free-flight-simulator/ along with /news/853/free-flight-sifsfsdfdsfmulator/ ... etc.
-
Also, trailing slash? Or no trailing slash?
Without
/downloads/878/fsx-concorde
With
/downloads/878/fsx-concorde/
-
Dear Theo,
Thank you for your response - i found your article very interesting.
So, just to clarify - in our case, the best URL method would be:
/images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/This would remove the suffixes and also have the ID numbers at the end; placing the target keywords closer to the root of the URL; which makes a very slight difference...
EDIT: Upon thinking about it, I feel that the final keyword-targeted page would be more natural if it appeared at the end of the URL. For example: /images/6816/aosta-valley/ (like you have done on your blog).
Also, should I limit the amount of hyphenated words in the URL? For example in your blog, you have /does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/ - perhaps it would be more concentrated and less spammy as /adding-suffix-urls-affect-seo/ ?
Let me know your thoughts.
Thank you for your help!
-
Matt Cutts states that the number of subfolders 'it is not a major factor': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_A1iRY6XTM
Furthermore, a blog I wrote about removing suffixes: http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/5/does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/
Another Matt Cutts regarding your seperate question about the keyword order: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I
Having some structure (in the form of a single subfolder) would greatly add to the usability of your website in my opinion. If you can manage to use the correct redirects (301) from your old pages to your new ones, I wouldn't see a clear SEO related reason not to switch.
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
-
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
Category Page as Shopping Aggregator Page
Hi, I have been reviewing the info from Google on structured data for products and started to ponder.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox6
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products Here is the scenario.
You have a Category Page and it lists 8 products, each products shows an image, price and review rating. As the individual products pages are already marked up they display Rich Snippets in the serps.
I wonder how do we get the rich snippets for the category page. Now Google suggest a markup for shopping aggregator pages that lists a single product, along with information about different sellers offering that product but nothing for categories. My ponder is this, Can we use the shopping aggregator markup for category pages to achieve the coveted rich results (from and to price, average reviews)? Keen to hear from anyone who has had any thoughts on the matter or had already tried this.0 -
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
Using hreflang for international pages - is this how you do it?
My client is trying to achieve a global presence in select countries, and then track traffic from their international pages in Google Analytics. The content for the international pages is pretty much the same as for USA pages, but the form and a few other details are different due to how product licensing has to be set up. I don’t want to risk losing ranking for existing USA pages due to issues like duplicate content etc. What is the best way to approach this? This is my first foray into this and I’ve been scanning the MOZ topics but a number of the conversations are going over my head,so suggestions will need to be pretty simple 🙂 Is it a case of adding hreflang code to each page and creating different URLs for tracking. For example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
URL for USA: https://company.com/en-US/products/product-name/
URL for Canada: https://company.com/en-ca/products/product-name /
URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/products/product-name /
URL for rest of the world: https://company.com/en/products/product-name /1 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" /> With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0