Large event site - how should I structure my URLs?

[cos2030]

Hi guys,

I'm working on a new website which is consolidating a number of existing event sites into one. The existing sites use a variety of URL structures:

www.eventsite1.com/events/event-name

www.eventsite2.com/festival-program/event-name

www.eventsite3.com/event-name

This inconsistency has led to issues with tracking category usage properly in analytics - for instance, with eventsite3.com, events fall within categories (www.eventsite3.com/category-name) but as soon as you drill into an event detail page (www.eventsite3.com/event-name) from the category page, the category is lost to analytics. This is compounded when one event lives within multiple categories, as I can't figure out which category is the most effective for a particular event.

I've seen other event sites establish a canonical URL for a primary category, display it in the URL (i.e. www.eventsite4.com/primary-category/event-name) yet still let that event get hit via the secondary categories (www.eventsite4.com/secondary-category/event-name). This way, the categories get passed to analytics without any duplicate content issues (i.e. via the setting of canonicals)

Basically, I want to make sure that whatever instruction I give to the devs for the new site re: URL structure is correct from an SEO perspective and analytics perspective. Do I even need to worry about having the category in the URL?

Can someone please help me with this?

Hope this makes sense

Cheers

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Karl,

I can't give you a definitive answer on this as it's based on more data, but I think you need to keep in mind that you need an can separate on how your URL structure actually looks and the data you can save in Google Analytics. For example it's really easy to send custom pageviews data to Google Analytics. Also if you try to prefer having the category not in the URL it's still possible to send them to Google Analytics via either a custom pageview of custom dimension. So I would go for the best SEO option in your opinion and also the best option in Google Analytics so you get the best of both.