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.
Should we use brand name of product in URL
-
Hi all,
What is best for SEO. We sell products online. Is it good to mention the brand in the product detail page URL key if (part of) the brand is also in the home url?
So our URL is: www.brandXstore.com
Is it best to do: www.brandXstore.com/brandX-productA.html
of just do: www.brandXstore.com/ProductA.html
Thanks for quick answering
-
Agree with Brady & Adam on this one. Each great responses.
I'll just add that, for the most part, the URL should be for the user first and then the search engine. A lot of times brands have funk looking URLs that have numbers and symbols in them - not user friendly. So, I'd recommend adding your descriptive keyword/producA/B/C into the URL if it'll help the user understand your product and navigate your site better
Hope this helps!
-
Inserting the brand name again in the product page portion of the URL is unnecessary and looks like a keyword stuffing technique. Assuming the brand you're representing gets a lot of search traffic, focusing on the power of your domain should be more than enough to attract visits to your site.
Focusing on users should be your main focus when designing URL structures. As a potential customer, repeating the brand name in the URL of pages would be unnecessary and unattractive. Thus, it will (probably) have the same effect on search engines. As Adam said, short and user-friendly is the way to go.
-
Hi Jeroen
I would look more into making sure the URLs are kept fairly short and friendly. I wouldn't expect a huge SEO impact from this, I would look more into the question "does including the brand name in the URL improve usability for my visitors?". Maybe you have several "ProductA" all by different brands? If this is the case then yes I would include the brand name in the URL.
If you are selling only BrandX products on your store and nothing else then I would not bother putting in the brand name as you are already including the brand in your main site URL. Having it twice could make the URL look at bit keyword stuffed.
Hope this helps.
Adam
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
-
Is using REACT SEO friendly?
Hi Guys Is REACT SEO friendly? Has anyone used REACT and what was the results? Or do you recommend something else that is better suited for SEO? Many thanks for your help in advance. Cheers Martin
Algorithm Updates | | martin19700 -
Product pages - should the meta description match our product description?
Hi, I am currently adding new products to my website and was wondering, should I use our product description (which is keyword optimised) in the meta description for SEO purposes? Or would this be picked up by Google as duplicate content? Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | markjoyce1 -
Using Brand value for SEO: Can we use keyword with brand name?
Hi Moz community, I am curious to know this. Let's say there is a brand value for a company. It has it's own popularity that it's been mentioned across the internet and social media directly with brand name without their service or industry keyword. Now if the company started promoting themselves like keyword along with their brand name, will it help them to rank for that keyword. For example, Moz is already famous, now they want to rank for "SEO" and related keywords, so they started calling themselves on internet "Moz SEO"; will this fetch them in ranking for keyword SEO? My ultimate question is, using primary keyword along with brand name will work out in ranking for that primary keyword or not? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Discontinued Products
We have a medium/large ecommerce site that imports manufacturer products every year (or when new products come in/out) We are trying to decide what to do with the discontinued product pages. As we are using shopify we do not have an option of custom404 error pages so we cannot use this. We also cannot do a 30 redirect with a custom message as to why they are being redirected so dont like that idea. What we were thinking of doing was leaving the page with its content and adding a message that the item has been discontinued and a few similar products listed below with an option of clicking on a link to go up a level to the category/subcategory of that products brand. My question is: Should we noindex/follow these pages when they go out of stock so search engines don't continue to index them. Should we add the tag: (we do not have advance warning so it would be at the time that we update the listing to say item is no longer available) My concern with doing the above and leaving it to be indexed is that google may regard these pages as soft 404 if the bounce rate gets very high - as users will not be staying very long on the page. Any advice would be very much appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | henya0 -
How Additional Characters and Numbers in URL affect SEO
Hi fellow SEOmozers, I noticed that a lot of websites have additional characters and words at the end of the URL in addition keyword optimized URL. Mostly for E-Commerce sites For example: www.yoursite.com/category/keyword?id=12345&Keyword--Category--cm_jdkfls_dklj or wwww.yoursite.com/category/keyword#83939=-37292 My question is how does the additional characters or parameters(not necessarily tracking parameters) affect SEO? Does it matter if i have additional keywords in the additional stuff in the URL (1st url example)? If you can provide more information, that would be helpful. Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | TommyTan0 -
Google automatically adding company name to serp titles
Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I was surprised to see that Google had algorithmically modified my page titles in the search results by adding the company name to the end of the (short) title. <title>About Us</title> became About Us - Company Name Interestingly, this wasn't consistent - sometimes it was "company name Limited" and sometimes just "company name. Anyone else notice this or is this a recent change?
Algorithm Updates | | DougRoberts0 -
Does the use of an underscore in filenames adversely affect SEO
We have had a page which until recently was ranked first or second by Google UK and also worldwide for the term "Snowbee". It is now no longer in the top 50. I ran a page optimization report on the url and had a very good score. The only criticism was that I had used an atypical character in the url. The only unusual character was an underscore "_" We use the underscore in most file names without apparent problems with search engines. In fact they are automatically created in html files by our ecommerce software, and other pages do not seem to have been so adversely affected. Should we discontinue this practice? It will be difficult but I'm sure we can overcome this if this is the reason why Google has marked us down. I attach images of the SEO Report pages 8fDPi.jpg AdLIn.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | FFTCOUK0 -
What are the good strategies using satellite sites in SEO??
Hello to everybody, We'are thinking about launching a massive amount of satellite websites in order to promote our website. Is it really efficient in terms of link building? Or is the ROI really small due to the amount of time and money needed to create and manage these websites? Thanks a lot!!! Update: Thanks to all of you for all these interesting answers!
Algorithm Updates | | sarenausa1