Strategies in Renaming URLs
-
We're renaming all of our Product URLs (because we're changing eCommerce Platforms), and I'm trying to determine the best strategy to take.
Currently, they are all based on product SKUs. For example, Bacon Dental Floss is:
http://www.stupid.com/fun/BFLS.html
Right now, I'm thinking of just using the Product name. For example, Bacon Dental Floss would become:
http://www.stupid.com/fun/bacon-dental-floss.html
Is this strategy the best for SEO? Any better ideas?
Thanks!
-
Classic. Well maybe he shouldn't change anything if he is currently ranked #3, but I assume that is due to the strength of his domain, stupid.com.
All of this talk about bacon reminded me of a couple of fellows here in Seattle who come out with a new bacon product every year, and to promote they also come out with some type of bacon art.
May I present to you, Bacon Kevin Bacon:
-
Well dignan, you will probably be as surprised as I am right now. Go ahead and Google Bacon Dental floss.
In our ignorance, we assumed it was not a competitive market. Justin's site is ranked 3rd for the term behind amazon.com and another listing. I checked the first 50 results and it is filled with various sites all specifically titled "Bacon Dental Floss".
I have to go. A friend of mine has a hot tip on a new product, Flounder Apple juice and I need to catch the IPO.
-
I agree with Ryan.
The best practice would be to include the full name and/or description of the product. It is doubtful that the Bacon Dental Floss competition is extremely fierce, so the first link with proper title tags and content will most likely end up as a top result, but why not do things correctly for maximum impact over time.
I do not expect any free bacon dental floss for my participation in this thread.
-
Bacon Dental Floss? That's actually a product? Wow.
I guess if Clamato juice is out there then why not Bacon Dental Floss.
I apologize but I needed to get that out of my system. As for your question, you desire readable URLs with keywords in them. So your second example is preferred.
The next step of improvement would be to use friendly URLs which strip the html extension. It would shorten your URLs by 5 characters and make them even more readable: www.stupid.com/fun/bacon-dental-floss
-
You want keywords in the url. Use whatever the keywords are best for bacon dental floss.
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
-
Keywords in URL
I have an ecommerce store and i am using moz to get it into the best seo situation... my question is this..... I want to know how important it is to have the targeted keyword actually in the product page url.... I working on meta title and description which is good, but if i start changing all my product urls, it has major impact on the work i have to do since i would have to redo all my product links in ads, and all my product urls in emails, etc. So how much of a part do the urls play in seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bkhoward20010 -
URL Structure Question
Am starting to work with a new site that has a domain name contrived to help it with a certain kind of long tail search. Just for fictional example sake, let's call it WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com. The idea is that people might do searches for "what are the best restaurants in seattle" and over time they would make some organic search progress. Again, fictional top level domain example, but the real thing is just like that and designed to be cities in all states. Here's the question, if you were targeting searches like the above and had that domain to work with, would you go with... whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle-washington whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/washington/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/what-are-the-best-restaurants-in-seattle-wa ... or what and why? Separate question (still need the above answered), would you rather go with a super short (4 letter), but meaningless domain name, and stick the longtail part after that? I doubt I can win the argument the new domain name, so still need the first question answered. The good news is it's pretty good content. Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Domain.com/old-url to domain.com/new-url
HI, I have to change old url`s to new one, for the same domain and all landing pages will be the same: domain.com/old-url I have to change to: domain.com/new-url All together more than 70.000 url. What is best way to do that? should I use 301st redirect? is it possible to do in code or how? what could you please suggest? Thank you, Edgars
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edzjus3330 -
Attack of the dummy urls -- what to do?
It occurs to me that a malicious program could set up thousands of links to dummy pages on a website: www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy123 www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy456 etc.. How is this normally handled? Does a developer have to look at all the parameters to see if they are valid and if not, automatically create a 301 redirect or 404 not found? This requires a table lookup of acceptable url parameters for all new visitors. I was thinking that bad url names would be rare so it would be ok to just stop the program with a message, until I realized someone could intentionally set up links to non existent pages on a site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood1 -
Massive URL Migration with thousands of 301
Hey Everyone! I'm currently working on a project that we have A Lot of product pages and we have thousands of URL's that need to be 301'd over. I know this can be a major issue and could lead to tons of errors. What is everyone's thought of doing such a huge Migration, Should I do it all in phases? or should I do them all at once so they can all be indexed together? What would you suggest to be the best way to go about doing such a massive migration?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
What is the best strategy for linking to sub category pages?
My site is set up like this (i have x6 categories and all are similar) Home Page - Category - sub category - X4 detail pages My category page provides a summary/introduction of the subject, my sub category page is the "money page" with ability to quote & buy - my detail pages provide supporting material. What is the best internal linking strategy between these pages? (in addition, in one category i have x6 sub categories but only one of them is a "money page", should i be linking all of these pages back to the money page?) Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Urls missing from product_cat sitemap
I'm using Yoast SEO plugin to generate XML sitemaps on my e-commerce site (woocommerce). I recently changed the category structure and now only 25 of about 75 product categories are included. Is there a way to manually include urls or what is the best way to have them all indexed in the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
Does Google count links on a page or destination URLs?
Google advises that sites should have no more than around 100 links per page. I realise there is some flexibility around this which is highlighted in this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru One of Google's justifications for this guideline is that a page with several hundred links is likely to be less useful to a user. However, these days web pages are rarely 2 dimensional and usually include CSS drop--down navigation and tabs to different layers so that even though a user may only see 60 or so links, the source code actually contains hundreds of links. I.e., the page is actually very useful to a user. I think there is a concern amongst SEO's that if there are more than 100ish links on a page search engines may not follow links beyond those which may lead to indexing problems. This is a long winded way of getting round to my question which is, if there are 200 links in a page but many of these links point to the same page URL (let's say half the links are simply second ocurrences of other links on the page), will Google count 200 links on the page or 100?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SureFire0