URL Path. What is better for SEO
-
Hello Moz people,
Is it better for SEO to have a URL path like this:
flowersite.com/anniversary_flowers/dozen_roses
OR
Is it better to have the full trail of pages in the URL?
-
There is no golden rule but generally yes, the page higher in a structure would be considered slightly more important, especially if your sitemap indicates page importance automatically, but a proper structure has far more benefits.
As long as you don' overcomplicate your structure it wouldn't make much difference whether your roses are at:
or
domain.com/anniversary-flowers/roses
as for no 4 - could it be that roses would fit many of the categories and therefore have been taken out of the structure to avoid duplicate content issues?
I often see pages deeper in the category tree ranking just as high if not higher than top categories for their respective keywords. At the end of the day Pete, it's the content that will rank your page not the url.
Using common sense, do you think Google would promote a model of websites where all pages and categories are always in the root? Would you use a library where all books are stuffed into 1 section? I don't think so.
-
Hi All,
I am no expert but we have just done redone our url structure and these are points we had to weigh up.
- I thought the closer to the root domain the more important the page ?
- However, it's always not feasible to have every page only one level from root so what we did , is have the url structure follow the bread crumb structure of our site and I believe this works well
- That makes it consistent and easy for the user/crawlers to understand
- Saying that though, if roses are one of your best sellers all year round , then it may warrant to have that url as closer to root as possible still have others using a category structure. I have seen that done on some large sites that sell alot of a particular item
Pete
-
This is very often overlooked but in my opinion the right URL structure is critical for any site, because the on site optimisation and content creation for landing pages will be very much determined by the structure of your URL's. Logical structure also helps users understanding and navigating the site.
I always suggest a "library" approach, so creating a logical structure similar to a library where a book (or a product/service/article etc.) falls under one parent category, which falls under a higher parent category, similar to:
science-books/physics/newton-inventions
entertainment-books/childrens-books/harry-potter
I your case the first example of URL path makes more sense, but the question is - are dozen roses only anniversary flowers? Spend a few hours organising your products into categories that make logical sense and create a URL structure to reflect that but keeping in mind the keywords people are searching for to find your products. It's not easy so don't rush it.
Ah and use hyphes (-) rather than underscores (_) in your urls...
-
Hi Garrettkite,
There are 2 things that I would answer:
- Firstly, don't use underscore (_) in the url. Instead, use hyphens (-). E.g. domain1.com/inner-page.aspx
- Secondly, whether to have a longer url or shorter version is totally your call. It is better to have a flat structure as much as possible. Never go for very long urls e.g. domain1.com/directory1/directory2/this-is-the-inner-page.aspx. On the other hand, focus on the structure of the website from user's point of view. Is it intuitive? Can a user reach to the inner page easily? But in some cases you may have to use longer urls which is again conditional.
Till date I have successfully worked on more than 100 sites by following the above standards.
Regards
-
I have read a lot about how it is important to keep URLs as short as possible, but I have also seen first-hand how longer, descriptive URLs have performed really well.
You'll probably get different answers from different people, and I don't know that either is right or wrong. In my opinion the longer URL would be more beneficial, assuming that trail of URLs isn't going to continue on and get too long - /anniversary_flowers/dozen_roses/red/bouquet - you get the idea.
My reasoning behind going with the longer URL structure is because you get the benefit of having both potential keyword search terms, anniversary flowers & dozen roses, in the page URL. Hope that 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
-
Virtual URL Google not indexing?
Dear all, We have two URLs: The main URL which is crawled both by GSC and where Moz assigns our keywords is: https://andipaeditions.com/banksy/ The second one is called a virtual url by our developpers: https://andipaeditions.com/banksy/signedandunsignedprintsforsale/ This is currently not indexed by Google. We have been linking to the second URL and I am unable to see if this is passing juice/anything on to the main one /banksy/ Is it a canonical? The /banksy/ is the one that is being picked up in serps/by Moz and worry that the two similar URLs are splitting the signal. Should I redirect from the second to the first? Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | TAT1000 -
Index SEO Performance
Hi guys, I was wondering if there is a difference in SEO performance between a page which ends with .html or just with a slash. For example: www.domain.com/test/ - www.domain.com/test.html Which one is better? And is there a difference between productpages and productcategory pages. Because we see mostly productpages ending with .html and category pages ending with a slash. Take a look at some big dutch companies like: http://www.coolblue.nl/
On-Page Optimization | | Happy-SEO
http://www.bol.com/
https://www.zalando.nl/ (product page) There are doing this with a reason.... i guess.... Thanks.1 -
Redirect both / and non-/ URLs?
I am doing SEO on WP site. Due to some duplicate pages (rel canonical was done before) I am doing 301 redirects at the moment. And I wonder if I need to redirect both links w/ and w/o trailing slash. Default is non www, w/o trailing slash. Like there is .com/category/news but there is same page linked in .com/news (well it works when permalink structure is set to /%category%/%postname% and returns 404 error when structure is set to /%postname%).
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ
I redirected .lt/naujienos to .lt/category/naujienos. Should I also redirect .lt/naujienos/ (with trailing slash)? There's absolutely no problem redirecting this, but there are some more pages which I want to edit their URLs and I wonder If I should do both redirects from links /w and w/o slash?1 -
Long URL's
So I'm super new at SEO and learning a lot. I'm a small business owner and enjoy doing it myself. Are long URL's good or bad? Like this: http://www.farnorthkennel.com/german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls/long-haired-german-shepherd-puppies-lava Is that too long? The german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls is an actual page with actual content. Do those hurt me?
On-Page Optimization | | Joshlaska0 -
Assigning Locations to Wordpress from SEO Perspective?
I am looking for a way to split up and assign my 400 Wordpress posts to my business' four separate office locations. The four offices are in four separate areas with distinct city names. What way makes the most sense from an SEO perspective - assigning the city names as categories? adding the location as a tag, or some other way that I haven't considered? Currently, all posts are categorized by content and have no mention of location. Happy to answer any questions you might need in order to answer. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | SDSLaw0 -
How to organize a Knowledge Center for best SEO?
Hi, My Client is facing pushback from her company on separating assets into different pages (webinars, press releases, by-lines, etc) vs lumping them all together in one page. We need to define the SEO benefits of doing this in an organized fashion vs one big lump. Can you help? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | ScratchMM0 -
German SEO
Just a quickie, Does anybody know of any strong German SEO agencies? Many Thanks Sean
On-Page Optimization | | Yozzer0 -
Keywords in URL:
what kind of URL should we use? www.keyword.net/keyword-city or www.keyword.net/city which URL you would prefer?
On-Page Optimization | | alibeef0