Url structure of a blog
-
We are trying to work out what the best structure for our blog is as we want each page to rank as highly as possible, we were looking at a flat structure similar to http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/ where every posts is after the blog/ but not in category's although the viewers can look in different category's from the top buttons on the page- photoshop - icons etc
or we where going to go for the structured way- blog/photoshop/blog-post.html
the only problem is that we will end up 4 deep at least with this and at least 80 characters in the url.
any help would be appreciated.
Thanks Shaun
-
Hey Shaun,
I wouldn't be so concerned with the length of the URL (see this Moz page outlining that URL length is second from the bottom in search ranking factors http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors according to 120 leading search marketers who participated) as you could put more efforts and time towards some of the other On-Page SEO items from the list to implement.
Just make sure your Categories, Archives and Tags from the blog are marked off as NoIndex/NoFollow. If you are using the All In One SEO plugin for WordPress (which I recommend), then you just have to check a couple boxes on the Settings page to accomplish this task to make the blog more SEO/search engine friendly.
Hope this was helpful! - Patrick
-
Hi Shaun
I would definitely recommend a flat structure as you have suggested.
Your CMS (Wordpress?) may crete category / tag links but whilst they are useful for human visitors to browse blog posts around a subject, they are not great for search engines, so set them if possible as nofollow links.
I hope that helps,
Peter
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
-
410 or 301 after URL update?
Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Menu Structure & SEO
Hi I have been trying to decide whether we need to change our menu structure http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/ We have a lot of subcategories which are not in the menu structure and for SEO I wonder whether its best to have menu drop downs, so if a customer hovers over one category, it will display all the subcategories within this. I am concerned that sub categories we are trying to rank are many levels away from the homepage e.g If you want to find leather office chairs from the homepage, you have to go to the 'More categories' link, then choose seating > office seating > leather office seating. Users need to do a lot of navigating before seeing what we offer. I would prefer if a user could see these options in the menu when they hover over it. Does anyone think this would help SEO or just customer journey? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Replace dynamic paramenter URLs with static Landing Page URL - faceted navigation
Hi there, got a quick question regarding faceted navigation. If a specific filter (facet) seems to be quite popular for visitors. Does it make sense to replace a dynamic URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants.html?a_type=239 by a static, more SEO friendly URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants/levis-pants.html by creating a proper landing page for it. I know, that it is nearly impossible to replace all variations of this parameter URLs by static ones but does it generally make sense to do this for the most popular facets choose by visitors. Or does this cause any issues? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennovators0 -
International URL Puzzle
Hello, I have 4 different URL's going to 4 different countries that all contain the same content and Google is seeing them as duplicate pages. For ecommerce reasons I have to have these 4 pages separated. Here is a example of the pages below so you can see the URL structure: www.example/com/canada www.example.com/australia www.example.com/usa www.example.com/UK How do I fix this duplicate content problem? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalops0 -
Purpose of a Blog in a website
How internal blog or external blog is helpful in SEO?why it is good to have a site with blog?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
New folder structure
We are in the process of relaunching one of our website's that will use a totally need folder structure. Previously we used mydomain.com/content/country/region/city/district/hotel_name/ Now we are changing to make the URL shorter, more precise - since we are using a new CMS, to be mydomain.com/gb_Hotel-Name/ My question is currently we've in the region of 10,000 pages indexed in Google. So we are going to have to create 301 permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. From your previous experience, is this the correct way of approaching the task.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeilTompkins0 -
Google Maps results doesn't show my site url but rather the maps url, why is this?
For several of my clients landing pages that show up in the Maps results the website url has been overwritten by the maps url (maps.google.com). Even though on my places page I have the correct website set up. Does anyone have any idea why they would be doing this and how I can correct it? Thanks kinldy in advance, Aaron. maps-url.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | afranklin0 -
Should I shorten my urls?
For my informational site I have a lot of urls that are way too long. When I first created the site, I wrote a script that takes out the common words of a post and fashions a url. So, for example, if the first few words of a question were: Hi there, I have a question about back pain. I'm wondering what drugs would be good for relief and how I can get some help? then my url may be: www.mydomain.com/question?id=123-question-back-pain-wondering-drugs-good-relief-how-get-some-help Once I got learning about seo I realized that these urls were too long but I never did anything about them. Should I be shortening these, or is my time best spent doing something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes2