URL Structure for Study Guides
-
I'm creating study guides for various musicals, plays and operas. A few issues:
- I want to easily view in Google Analytics data for all study guides, data at the category level (musical,play, opera) and data for an individual show.
- I want urls to be as short as possible for usability purposes.
- Some show titles are the same for shows in different categories. For example, there is the play Romeo and Juliet but there is also an opera Romeo and Juliet.
- Each study guide contains multiple sections that will live on different URLs (overview, context, plot summary, characters)
What would be the ideal URL structure? Here's what I was currently thinking we should use:
/show/play/romeo-juliet/
/show/play/romeo-juliet/context
/show/play/romeo-juliet/plot
/show/play/romeo-juliet/characters
-
Thanks! I think we'll go ahead and remove /shows from the URL structure and use Advanced Segments in Analytics.
-
Absolutely, what you would do is create an advanced segment in Google Analytics which includes all of the show types. That will give the same info.
There is even an alternative if you want to have this in the old way in Google Analytics, you would overwrite the usual pageview and create a custom one. For example on this page: /play/romeo-juliet the normal pageview would be: ga('send', 'pageview'); if you would change it to: ga('send', 'pageview', '/show/play/romeo-juliet'); it would still record the view in the old way. As I said, I don't like creating custom pageviews for this purpose.
-
If I don't use the /shows subdomain, is there still a good way to see in Google Analytics how much traffic is going to the study guides in general, regardless of show type?
-
Hi Jason,
Why not do it shorter and use: /play/romeo-juliet and /opera/romeo-juliet so you would drop the /show/ part out of the URL? Then /play/ or /plays/ would be an overview of all plays. Besides that I think you did a great job for the URL structure. You've checked if these are the keyword most people look for: content, plot, characters, right?
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 having the same URL in several sitemaps a problem for google?
We have 30 sitemaps, one for each language version of our site. About 5000 pages per sitemap.
Reporting & Analytics | | lcourse
To get a better idea on which pages google is not indexing, I thought about quickly generating sitemaps by page cagetories to see if there are any patterns. Any problems if I submit now new additional sitemaps dividing all our pages by product page, considering that the same pages are already in our existing sitemaps we submitted in the search console. So having same URL in more than 1 sitemap would be a problem? As a side note, we observed when adding a sitemap index that google search console in its count of total indexed pages, now counts every page twice since we submitted both the sitemap index and the individual sitemaps, so search console does not recognize in count that sitemaps in sitemaps index are identical to the ones we submitted individually in search console.0 -
Changing URL Parameters in Webmaster Tools
We have a bit of a conundrum. Webmaster tools is telling us that they are crawling too many URLs: Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site: http://www.uncommongoods.com/ In their list of URL examples, all of the URLs have tons of parameters. We would probably be ok telling Google not to index any of the URLs with parameters. We have a great URL structure. All of our category and product pages have clean links (no parameters) The parameters come only from sorts and filters. We don't have a need for Google to index all of these pages. However, Google Analytics is showing us that over the last year, we received a substantial amount of search revenue from many of these URLs (800+ of them converted) So, Google is telling us they are unhappy. We want to make Google happy by ignoring all of the paramter URLs, but we're worried this will kill the revenue we're seeing. Two questions here: 1. What do we have to lose by keeping everything as-is. Google is giving us errors, but other than that what are the negative repercussions? 2. If we were to de-index all of the parameter URLs via Webmaster tools, how much of the revnenue would likely be recovered by our non-parameter URLs? I've linked to a screenshot from Google Analytics ArxMSMG.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | znotes0 -
How to setup Google Analytic goals that go to different urls?
I would like to setup my form's conversion rate as a goal in my Google Analytics account. The goal is complete when someone enters their information and hits submit. Logically, the "Thank you page" would be the destination url for the goal. My problem is that the thank you page is outside of the primary domain, for example, my site is: SiteExampl.com but the Thank you URL is thankyouurl.com Is it possible to setup a goal like this? If so how. Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | christinarule0 -
GATC New code structure?
Hi Guys, One of my clients has this code showing up, and it is receiving data! Is this normal? First time I ever see such a code! Thanks for clarifying!
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
What is the SEO Impact of Adding a Directory to URL
I would like to add a new directory named “products” for all of the product detail pages on my site. Instead of having the URL for a product be “mysite.com/product-details-page.aspx” we would like to change it to “mysite.com.com/products/product-detail-page.aspx.” I want to do this to enable us to add product pages to our traffic funnel analysis by filtering visits to the "product" directory - right now we can't track visits to product pages in the funnel because they are just one-off the main site. I know this change will require redirects for every single product. Is there anything else that needs to be done? My main question is, will this change negatively impact the SEO value of the product pages? We have several product pages ranking in the SERPs, and I don't know if pushing them one directory further will change that. Thanks for your input!
Reporting & Analytics | | pbhatt0 -
Count of words in all urls in a subdomian
Hi, I am trying to understand in a simple way how much content (words per url) are included in all urls under a subdomain. Is there a way to get this information from any of the tools ? thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | picolo0 -
Webmaster Not found URLs
Dear All, I would really like help with this. Due to some unknown reason (another thread is open for this reason), my google webmaster is showing 7000 not found URL's. Now, when i try to find out the day these broken URLs were detected, webmaster is showing dates between November 2011 to December 2nd, 2011. I havent found a single not found error showing after 2nd December 2011. So does that mean that the mistake has been solved? Because daily webmaster is adding 200-300 not found URLs. Along with this, my traffic has dropped drastically since 12th December and has still not recovered. Are these not found URLs the reason for this sudden traffic drop? If so, then i m ready to find someone for paid seo to remove this error. I would love to have some concrete answers for these questions. Thanksss
Reporting & Analytics | | hith2340 -
Tagging URLs Linkbuilding and anchor links
Hi, I am going to publish a press release on a number of different websites. First and foremost, I want to build anchor links back to website for specific keywords. Secondly I want to measure clickthrus from each site using parameter tracking in GA. I want to know if I put in a url with ?utm_source=xxx, will this have any impact upon my linkbuilding efforts? i.e. will search engines attribute the keyword to the long url with tracking or the url without tracking. I understand that everything from the ? mark is ignored. However, i just want to double check before I publish release. Thanks for your help. Mik
Reporting & Analytics | | increation0