Better to hyphenate URL or no?
-
Sea Glass Jewelry or Sea-Glass-Jewelry
My domain name does not have my keyword in it, so I have been using the category as a means to get the keyword in the URL. My site would say www.abcdefghijk.com/sea-glass-jewelry/sterling-starfish-necklace
When I run the review, it tells me that I have too many parameters. Is it too long? Should I remove hyphens? Which is better?
-
URL Readability = Clickability (providing the URL is not too long.)
When you see results in SERPS, the readability (reading ease for a human reader) can help your click-thru rates. It helps the reader to understand if they are interested in your content. Also, it helps search engines to know what your page is about. Underscores are not nearly as good. Category names are often automatically hyphenated by most shopping cart systems, no?
-
I know Google has announced they prefer hyphens to underscores ( website.com/this-is-better) (website.com/this_is_not). Personally I think it depends on the situation and agree to not overdo it. With longer URL's its hard to read with no spacing.
-
The hyphens are ok but I would be careful not to overdo it. When you say "too many parameters" - when talking about SEO, these aren't parameters. If you're doing ecommerce, parameters will be the bits that limit or narrow down your products, such as size.
www.example.com/pink-tshirts?size=xl
?size=xl is the parameter.
You may run into duplication issues if you have too many parameters (such as color of shirts where nothing else on the page changes.)
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
-
Should I utilize URL re-writes to include keywords and other optimised page elements on my website?
Hi there, I am working on a medical recruitment website: https://wave.com.au/ I have noticed that our Job Search and Job Listings section of the website is lacking a little bit in terms of SEO optimisation. For example, at the moment this is our search page (with locum work type selected): https://wave.com.au/search-locum/results If you add a location, for example, NSW and then click search again, it updates the URL to: https://wave.com.au/search-locum/results?LocumSearchForm_Location[]=NSW&action_doSearch=Search+jobs I did a check what some competitors and leaders in the recruitment industry were doing and I came across: https://www.ochrerecruitment.com.au/jobs/anaesthetics/new-south-wales/locum/ If you click the different filters/options, it updates the URL to include more clearly defined categories. Some websites would even have a H1 heading tag that would update based on the filters/options you selected. Should I set up a set of URL re-writes and re-structure my website a little bit so that dynamic URLs change to static etc.? Does anyone have any best practice knowledge in regards to this? I have been referencing the following article: https://moz.com/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-the-best-practice-for-seo-is-still-clear
On-Page Optimization | | Wavelength_International0 -
Using a hyphen in title tags and the impact of spaces
Hi I am trying to arrive at a best practice template for a title tag for my organization so does the following template still holds Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name will anything be impacted if I eliminate the spaces between the hyphen, will search bots be still able to treat the first one as a priority and the second as the secondary? Primary Keyword-Secondary Keyword | Brand Name thank you
On-Page Optimization | | lina_digital0 -
URL Structure Suggestion
Hi
On-Page Optimization | | sandeep.clickdesk
My site url: http://goo.gl/AiOgu1
We are working on URL structure of our website. I have one query about URL structure.
Which one is good URL structure according to user and SEO prospective.
The targeted keyword for the particular page is "wordpress live chat". Is it worthful to rewrite the present url "https://www.abc.com/wordpress" to "https://www.abc.com/wordpress-live-chat" Please suggest.0 -
Is it better to have an hreflang go to the home page in a different language if there's no corresponding page
If I have some pages in English, but not in Spanish on my website: Should my hreflang go to the home page on the Spanish site? Or should I not have an "es-MX" hreflang for that page? Ideally I would have all the pages translated, but this has not all been done yet.
On-Page Optimization | | RoxBrock0 -
Wordpress sitemap url problem causing WMT errors
The following types of links are appearing in my webmaster tools crawl errors report under 'other'. I've noticed they are in my sitemaps ( I run wordpress and use a plugin called Google XML sitemaps). How do I get rid of this error? http://www.musicliveuk.com/bands/postname%/
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
What are the best practices for google indexing ajax response urls?
We just did a build to our site and our server erros went up to over 9,500. After looking into it, it seems like google is crawling the ajax urls and coming back with the errors. Here is one example http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/productDetail.do?navType=type&vehicleId=1423&webTypeId=68&navTitle=Drive&webCatId=9&prodFamilyId=29660 If you know of any good articles on this please send them my way.
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
Hierarchy and consistency in ecommerce URLs
One of the first things I remember reading about SEO and URLs, a long time ago, is that keywords are important, and hierarchy is important, for search engines and for users. Hierarchy in URLs would give the search engines an idea of the structure of the site, and users would be able to edit the URLs to continue navigating. I'm wondering about URLs, hierarchy and usability lately, since I've seen that ASOS uses a new URL structure on their site. At first glance, I thought it was brilliant, so I would like to get all of your opinions as well. For those of you that haven't seen the URLs: for categories, ASOS uses a structure as you would expect it, but for products they don't insert the category in the URL. Instead they insert the brand name as the first part of the URL, followed by the product title. Some examples: Category:
On-Page Optimization | | DocdataCommerce
www.asos.com/women/dresses/... Product:
www.asos.com/french-connection/french-connection-tie-waist-pocket-stripe-dress/... I can see the importance of brand name for a site like ASOS, and like how they stressed this by inserting not the category but the brand for products. I don't know how much ASOS still relies on organic non-ASOS related keyword traffic, but still. Now, for hierarchy, I guess a good internal linking structure will tell the search engines about the hierarchy of a site as well, right? So perhaps hierarchy in the URL isn't that important? Perhaps something like this would be just as good as anything, given a good internal link structure? www.onlinestore.com/category/
www.onlinestore.com/subcategory/
www.onlinestore.com/brand/product-title/ Now, I understand that if you use this structure, you wouldn't be able to have men/shirts and women/shirts, but let's say that you don't have subcategories that use the same names. In this case, how important is hierarchy? And, what do you think about this URL structure for an ecommerce site for which brands are important?0 -
URL question
Hi guys, the pro campaign thing you got going is wicked, love it. I'm recieving good results with my keywords and have noticed that categories that go beyond sub/sub/sub don't do to well. So I wanna move those that do one step up which makes it go from: http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/advanced-routine/scales/aeolian to here http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/advanced-routine/aeolian The existing menu system that follow all these categories across the site will soon go so it won't be a user friendly problem, I will have other type of menus. But, and here is the question: Would I greatly benefit from taking the non existent menu away and just go for: http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/aeolian while i'm at it? Or do I stick with my current structure? I guess my real question is; how much is there to flat URLs? Cheers -dan lundholm spytunes.com
On-Page Optimization | | spytunes0