Any arguments against eliminating all (non-blog) subfolders?
-
Short URLs seem to do the trick from a UX perspective. For example: /primary-care vs. /why/specialties/primary-care . This convention will be applied over 30-40 pages. Note that while "/why/specialties/primary-care" isn't terribly ugly, some of our pages would look a little overly-keywordy if we go with the subfolder approach.
-
Having some level of structure in you site can be helpful for analytics, too. For Moz for example, we can look at everything happening on the blog by looking at /blog, everything on Q&A by looking at /community/q/, etc.
-
I prefer shorter URLs, but it depends on the size and structure of your site. If you have tens of thousands of pages, then using subfolders to organize things probably makes sense. Likewise, if your site has 5 main categories, it may make sense again to have 5 subcategories to give your site structure.
If you are changing directory structure for an existing site, be aware that you will likely see your rankings drop as Google tries to figure out the changes. 301 redirects do not pass all the link value, so you may need to do a bit of link building to get back up to your current level.
If it's just a few pages you want to redirect, you could also create a shortcut URL such as "domain.com/primary" that 301 redirects to the full URL ("why/specialists/primary-care") so that you can have a short URL that customers can memorize without sacrificing your site structure.
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
-
Need help with best practices on eliminating old thin content blogs.
We have about 100 really old blog posts that are nothing more than a short trip review w/ images. Consequently these pages are poor quality. Would best practices be to combine into one "review page" per trip, reducing from 100 to about 10 better pages and implement redirects? Or is having more pages better with less redirects? We only have about 700 pages total. Thanks for any input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KarenElaine0 -
MOZ is showing that I have non- indexed blog tag posts are they supposed to be nonindexed. My articles are indexed just not the blog tags that take you to other similar articles do I need to fix this or is it ok?
MOZ is showing that my blog post tags are not indexed my question is should they be indexed? my articles are indexed just not the tags that take you to posts that are similar. Do I need to fix this or not? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tyler58910 -
How to handle a blog subdomain on the main sitemap and robots file?
Hi, I have some confusion about how our blog subdomain is handled in our sitemap. We have our main website, example.com, and our blog, blog.example.com. Should we list the blog subdomain URL in our main sitemap? In other words, is listing a subdomain allowed in the root sitemap? What does the final structure look like in terms of the sitemap and robots file? Specifically: **example.com/sitemap.xml ** would I include a link to our blog subdomain (blog.example.com)? example.com/robots.xml would I include a link to BOTH our main sitemap and blog sitemap? blog.example.com/sitemap.xml would I include a link to our main website URL (even though it's not a subdomain)? blog.example.com/robots.xml does a subdomain need its own robots file? I'm a technical SEO and understand the mechanics of much of on-page SEO.... but for some reason I never found an answer to this specific question and I am wondering how the pros do it. I appreciate your help with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo.owl0 -
Dealing with non-canonical http vs https?
We're working on a complete rebuild of a client's site. The existing version of the site is in WordPress and I've noticed that the site is accessible via http and https. The new version of the site will have mostly or entirely different URLs. It seems that both http and https versions of a page will resolve, but all of the rel-canonical tags I've seen point to the https version. Sometimes image tags and stylesheets are https, sometimes they aren't. There are both http and https pages in Google's index. Having looked at other community posts about http/https, I've gathered the following: http/https is like two different domains. http and https versions need to be verified in Google Webmaster Tools separately. Set up the preferred domain properly. Rel-canonicals and internal links should have matching protocols. My thought is that we will do a .htaccess that redirects old URLs regardless of the protocol to new pages at one protocol. I would probably let the .css and image files from the current site 404. When we develop and launch the new site, does it make sense for everything to be forced to https? Are there any particular SEO issues that I should be aware of for a scenario like this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GOODSIR0 -
Is WordPress a Blog in the eyes of Google?
Hi, My online Shop is based on WordPress with the WooCommerce plugin. Now, I have met a SEO guy who told me that's bad in the eyes of Google: Because Google apparently sees my website as a blog and not as a E-Commerce site. Wow, this statement really confused my, since I am working so hard on content and good rankings. Any opinions on this would be appreciated. Best, Robin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal0 -
Moving popular blog from root to subdomain. Considerations & impact?
I'd like to move the popular company blog from /ecommerce-blog to blog.bigcommerce.com.WordPress application is currently living inside the application that runs the .com and is adding a large amount of files to the parent app, which results in longer deployment times than we'd like. We would use HTTP redirection to handle future requests (e.g. HTTP status code 301). How can this be handled from a WP point of view? What is the impact of SEO, rankings, links, authority? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fullstackmarketing.io0 -
Releasing Multiple Language Blog Articles ?
I was hoping anyone could give me some advice on my situation Our blog is a huge traffic source for us, we frequently release fresh blog articles on our English language website bringing lots of relevant traffic for a variety of different relevant topics Some of these articles would be very useful and relevant for visitors to our German website so i would like to get them translated and posted on our separate German language blog on our separate German website. The article text will not change much as the information is the same for Germany also How should i go about this without running into duplicate content issues with Google I looked into rel=alternate and realized that i cannot use this over two separate websites, i also thought about rel=canonical but it doesn't look like this would be suitable either Can anybody please give me any advice or thoughts on this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Duplicating an article I wrote on an external blog
Hi, I wrote a blog article on another site. I would like to add the article to my site as well and would like to know the best way to do it. If I duplicate the article that I wrote would I then risk getting a penalty for duplicate content? If so, then what is the best way for me to include the article on my site for the benefit of my readers, but not lead to the duplicate content problem? Would it be better to use a canonical tag? Or to noindex the page? If I use the canonical tag, am I helping to make the article on the external blog stronger? Where is I use the noindex tag I am not helping my site nor that article I think, is that right? Last question, if I offer the copy of the article on my site and use the canonical or noindex tag then my site does not receive any direct benefit from the article for SEO. In other words the article wont appear in the search index with a link to my site. What about the comments that people write on the article on my site? That is unique content which may have great questions or points. I want to ensure those can be indexed properly. If I noindex the page I lose out. If I canonicalize (is that a word?) the page then I don't know if will send search results based on those comments to the external blog where that information (the comments from my site) does not exist. Thank you for any help to better understand this part of seo.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NikkiGaul0