What is the optimal URL Structure for Internal Pages
-
Is it more SEO friendly to have an internal page URL structure that reads like www.smithlawfirm.com/personal-injury/car-accidents or www.smithlawfirm.com/personal-injury-car-accidents? The former structure has the benefit of showing Google all the sub-categories under personal injury; the later the benefit of a flatter structure. Thanks
-
Thanks, I had read this post before adding my question.
-
The URL structure can be helpful for analysis when looking at your analytics. See this post at LunaMetrics for reasons why you might want a directory structure. http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/
-
Category wise structure is alwaz a better option.
If your site is small than you can keep all pages in root folder, but as your site grows it would be very difficult for you to manage all pages on root & google will treat all pages at same level
go for 1st option.
-
I agree with John and oznappies.
A logical category system is very useful for your site admins, users and SEO. There are many benefits to a simple /personal-injury/car-accidents design.
Sites need to be balanced. A structure that is overly deep with categories is not desired, but an overly flat structure where every page is a child of the home page isn't going to provide the best user experience either.
-
It's shouldn't matter either way... though I would strongly advise that you're organizing your content appropriately. The directory structure will then build itself. Slashes or dashes? I would build it with the slashes.
Keep it human readable and you'll be in good shape
-
Since you will most likely have more than one form of personal injury, it would make more sense for a site architecure point of view to use category/type model ie. personal-injury/car-accidents. There probably is not any ranking difference, except that you could have a personal-injury landing page that links to the injury types and gains link juice in it's own right.
-
Rafi, I handle a few law firms that are involved in PI. I will give you an example of a site that performs very well: Actos-Lawsuit.org. If you look at our url structure you will see two things, hyphens and flat. You are asking about the firm site I am assuming. Obviously, you don't want more than three steps to any page. Within that context, I still believe the flatter the better. To take something from someone else a few months back regarding hyphens, look at the url on the page you are now viewing and what do you see? My suggestion is yes for the keeping it flat and absolutely yes for hyphens. Hope this helps.
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
-
JSON-LD product page markup for multiple currencies?
I haven't found a working example of a single product page with one "Offer" in multiple "priceCurrency" and "price" We have product pages with a single product URL which will offer different prices in different currencies based on the user's IP. Some of the language of the page will be translated based on the IP (this will have href lang tag) but the URL will not change. (We're aware TLD is considered best practice, however, this is not an option at this time.) Is the best option to update the markup based on what the corresponding "country"? I'm uncertain how this may be handled by crawlers. Eg, For the product page https://www.example.com/product1 displaying USD "offers": {
Web Design | | sb1030
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "USD",
"price": "7.99"} For the product pagehttps://www.example.com/product1 displaying EUR "offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "EUR",
"price": "7.50"} Thanks for any input.0 -
Anything wrong in linking to homepage from all sub domain pages?
Hi, We have 6 sub domains which are forums, guides, etc. They have their own visitors for the related queries. We are planning to divert some of them to the website to promote our product with latest content. We are planning to add a link from every page of sub domain to our website homepage. This makes additional thousands of internal links flowing to website homepage. Will this kind of internal linking structure hurts? Any risks involved? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz1 -
Moving servers which means moving ip address but using the same URL. Would it harm the website's SEO?
Hello everyone, The server (in-house) which we use to host our website is a bit old. We are using CDN77 for our static content. What if I move all our website to the CDN service? meaning I use their storage capability and just have our url point to the IP address they provide. Would that hurt our rankings?
Web Design | | Edgar-Cerecerez0 -
When Site:Domain Search Run on Google, SSL Error Appears on One URL, Will this Harm Ranking
Greetings MOZ Community: When a site:domain search is run on Google, a very strange URL appears in the search results. The URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com:2082/ The page displays a "the site's security certificate is not trusted." This only appears for one URL out of 400. Could this indicate a wider problem with the server's configuration? Is this something that needs to be corrected, and if so how? Our ranking has dropped a lot in the last few months. Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Site with no ads hit by Page Layout update?
Hi there! Can a site that has no ads on it be hit by Google's latest Page Layout update? Can it be hit for just one or two keywords? My site (www.ink2paper.com) has a decline in Google organic traffic in early Feb so my suspicion is the Page Layout update. However I have no ads on the site. Digging into GWMT I find that it is only one or 2 keywords that seems to have taken a dive, mainly [photo paper]. I used to get around 80 imps a day for this term. Then on 6 Feb it was down to 50; 7 Feb = 34; 8 Feb just 4 impressions! I got a spike back at usual levels on 10 & 11 Feb, but since then it has been back down to only 5 or so impressions a day. [photographic paper] took a small hit at the start of February, but has nose dived since the start of April. The homepage performs well for Google organic traffic - low bounce (22%) and good ecom conversion rate (14%) - although this is likely to be largely branded traffic. I feel my site is a 'good' result for the search term [photo paper], although there is always room for improvement of course! Any suggestions as to why Google has stopped showing my site for these keywords? All help is greatly appreciated. Cheers,
Web Design | | SimonHogg
Simon0 -
SEO page length 4500+ words
I have read varying discussions on this... some say it is good or rather it does not really matter (as long as not stuffed with keywords) and some say more than 1000+ words is bad! I have a travel site and I want to add an historical page about the zone. It is very interesting (very organic, not written for SEO purposes as such). It adds flavor and details to a site that is really all about sales. Does anyone have an opinion whether this is detrimental to SEO or not?
Web Design | | Llanero0 -
Transitioning to a dynamic home page. Impact on SEO?
Home page redesign advice, please. We're a growing college textbook publishing company; a unique one in that we publish everything under an open license. Our homepage www.flatworldknowledge.com has a solid page score (80), and since our product serves several different customers/audiences -- students, faculty, bookstores -- we're transitioning to a dynamic home page approach. Returning instructors will be served a personalized faculty page, returning students a student oriented page featuring the books they've most recently accessed, and first time/anon visitors will receive a more neutral welcome page until we know more about them. Pros, cons with this change to a dynamic homepage? What should we be thinking about/concerned about from an SEO perspective? How do you address title tags? Will this approach dilute page authority? Thanks all!
Web Design | | JasonBilog0