URL Optimisation Dilemma
-
First of all, I fully appreciate that I may be over analysing this, so feel free to highlight if you think I’m going overboard on this one.
I’m currently trying to optimise the URLs for a group of new pages that we have recently launched. I would usually err on the side of leaving the urls as they are so that any incoming links are not diluted through the 301 re-direct. In this case, however, there are very few links to these pages, so I don’t think that changing URLs will harm them.
My main question is between short URLs vs. long URLs (I have already read Dr. Pete’s post on this). Note: the URLs I have listed below are not the actual URLs, but very similar examples that I have created.
The URLs currently exist in a similar format to the examples below:
http://www.company.com/products/dlm/hire-ca
My first response was that we could put a few descriptive keywords in the url, with something like the following:
http://www.company/products/debt-lifecycle-management/hire-collection-agents - I’m worried though that the URL will get too long for any pages sitting under this.
As a compromise, I am considering the following:
http://www.company/products/dlm/hire-collection-agents
My feeling is that the second approach will give the best balance between having the keywords for the products and trying to ensure good user experience. My only concern is whether the /dlm/ category page would suffer slightly, but this would have ‘debt-lifecycle-management’ in the title tag.
Does this sound like a good approach to people? Or do you think I’m being a little obsessive about this? Any help would be appreciated
-
Makes sense - I understand now. Thanks for the clarification
-
Sure! What I mean is if (for example) your domain is debtlifestylemanagement.com, then having the dlm folder spelled out in the URL (i.e. debtlifestylemanagement.com/products/debt-lifecycle-management/hire-collection-agents) would be redundant & appear spammy. The same could happen if your domain had 'collection agents' in it.
I'm suggesting that I would "tend towards not including a keyword in the URI if it alreadyappears in the domain," especially if including it would only be for SEO purposes.
-
Thanks for your response Sheena, it's great to hear that I'm on the right track with this!
I was wondering if you could further explain the following part of your answer:
"What I can say is that the 'better way' depends on what words might already be in the domain, as I try to not be redundant (when possible) so it doesn't appear spammy/kw stuffed."
Are you suggesting that you'd tend towards not including a keyword if it appears elsewhere on the site and so search engines have enough context? Also, what do you mean by 'redundant'?
-
I'd say you're thinking about this in a smart way. First off, the existing URL structure isn't bad. I would consider this a low priority update, unless (or until) all other possible site issues are taken care of.
You're being smart about trying to find a balance of having descriptive yet not too long of a URL structure. What I can say is that the 'better way' depends on what words might already be in the domain, as I try to not be redundant (when possible) so it doesn't appear spammy/kw stuffed.
I 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
-
Affiliate Links Dilemma
Hello everyone. Our e-commerce website virtualsheetmusic.com has several hundreds affiliate incoming links, and many of them are "follow" links. I thought to redirect all incoming affiliate links to a "intermediate" page excluded by the robots.txt file in order to avoid any possible "commercial links" penalty from Google, but I now face a dilemma... most of our best referral links are affiliate links, by excluding those links from our back link profile could give us a big hit in terms of rankings. How would you solve this dilemma? What would you suggest doing in this sort of cases?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
URL structure change and xml sitemap
At the end of April we changed the url structure of most of our pages and 301 redirected the old pages to the new ones. The xml sitemaps were also updated at that point to reflect the new url structure. Since then Google has not indexed the new urls from our xml sitemaps and I am unsure of why. We are at 4 weeks since the change, so I would have thought they would have indexed the pages by now. Any ideas on what I should check to make sure pages are indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ang0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Canonical URL Tag
I have 3 websites with same content, I want to add Canonical tag to my main website. Is this also important to mentioned other duplicate URL in canonical tag in main website? or just need to just add
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
Tracking URLS and Redirects
We have a client with many archived newsletters links that contain tracking code at the end of the URL. These old URLs are pointing to pages that don't exist anymore. Is there a way to set up permanent redirects for these old URLs with tracking code? We have tried and it doesn't seem to work. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BopDesign0 -
Repeat name and location in URL or no ?
in this url www.stjeromemitsubishi.ca, is it a good thing to repeat the name and location in the url but with ''-''sign between? ex: www.stjeromemitsubishi.ca/partsandservice/stjerome-mitsubishi-contact.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidPilon0 -
URL blocked
Hi there, I have recently noticed that we have a link from an authoritative website, however when I looked at the code, it looked like this: <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="http://www.mydomain.com/" title="blocked::http://www.mydomain.com/">keyword</a> You will notice that in the code there is 'blocked::' What is this? has it the same effect as a nofollow tag? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Should I change wordpress urls?
Should I change my wordpress permalinks to include the keyword? For examples at the minute my url is http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is it better to be http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-bands/wedding-singer. 'home' is not relevant so surely 'live-bands' would be better? If I change the urls won't I lose 'link juice' as external links will all point to a url that no longer exists? Or will wordpress automatically redirect the old url to the new one? Finally, if I should change the url as described how do I do it on wordpress? I can only see how to edit the last bit of the url and not the middle bit.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0