URL Structure Category Pages -Current Moz Friday-
-
Hello,
regarding #15 of the last moz friday I have a question: http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urlsWhat would you prefer if the lenght of the URL will be still under 60 characters and you have an example like this:
Let's call it a specific page in a category. As I like the old shoe examples: You have a page about red shoes in your shoe category.
Which URL would you prefer:
a) www.mydomain.com/shoes/red-shoe
Personally I would prefer a) or would you already consider this as spammy? My real example is not that trivial like the shoe example and the categories will be in plural and the specific pages always in singular (like in the example shoes vs shoe).
c) would be to put it independently from the side structure on www.mydomain.com/red-shoe - but personally I have the experience that a) or b) will help the rankings of the category page if you have the specific pages in the same subfolder.
What's your opinion on this?
-
Option A. I wont even worry about it after that.
Your time is more important so putting it to work for the other more important parts of your SEO campaign is better.
I would worry about/focus on the content of that category page instead.
-
This is a great question - I'm really intrigued to see what people think on this.
I'm having a very similar issue with my site. Currently I am completely re-structuring the sites URL's ready for a rebuild.
My thoughts are that with option a). its much easier to target keywords better in the URL (if this is really necessary), but then I would also be concerned that it might seem a bit spammy.
with option b). its a shorter, more concise URL without any repetition (which is better for SEO within itself), but then it doesn't flow as well (when reading the URL) in terms of describing what the page is about.
-
Hi,
I will go with option 'a' & I don't think It would be consider as spammy.
Thanks
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
-
Schema Markup for eCommerce Category Pages?
My research indicates that applying an ItemList schema markup to our category pages is likely the best way to go. However, I've also ready that Google discourages schema markup on category pages. I'm just wondering if any of you have applied schema markup to your category pages and, if so, how did you do it? John,
On-Page Optimization | | JohnBrown75
Essay Writer1 -
Having country in page url, good idea or bad idea?
Lets say i sell louisville hockey sticks if i have a page url as louisville-hockey-sticks-canada is this better than louisville-hockey-sticks I have a .CA domain
On-Page Optimization | | garmatinc0 -
Toxic URL???
Hi I have a URL that produced page 1, number 1 to 3 for most of our industries top phrases. Then we received a google penalty, (as did several of our competitors on the same day). We were effectively wiped from google. After much disavowing we were allowed back into the search results, this took about 3 months. I have employed the services of a top London SEO company for over a year now and have seen no significant improvement. I believe they are doing there best, however there results are VERY poor. According to the various tools, (searchmetrics, woorank, semrush) to name but a few, our site scores very well, yet we are not getting the results. Page one seems to be full of totally new websites, most of which I have never heard of, and have appeared from nowhere. Should I scrap our URL and put up a completely new one, and put a redirect from the original one? This would be a biggy since our url has been around for 20 years. Thanks for reading. Andy
On-Page Optimization | | First-VehicleLeasing0 -
Page/Website Structure
Hello again Mozzers, We have a category, lets call it widgets. Within widgets are about a hundred or so products. For usability my predecessor made the following layout Widgets Main Cateogry - Links off homepage - (no content just links to the 3 sub-categories)
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
- Widgets by Resolution
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 0.1 Resolution widgets
0.2 resolution widgets
- Widgets by Capacity
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 1 capacity widgets
2 capacity widgets
- Widgets by Type
---- About 12 subcategories This was a major improvement from a userbility perspective as it made a very complex product range navigatable by the major features or basic type. However, as you can imaging we now have 60+ very similiar pages all displaying very similiar products a nightmare for SEO. It also isnt ideal for user navigation as it take too many clicks to get to the products. I propose the following fix, and i wanted your opinion. Widget Main Category - Link from homepage (Consolidated with Widgets by Type)
-300 Words of content
-Links to the 12 Sub-type Catoregies (These are pages i can fill with content + products. This would give me a more ordinary structure of which I can focus each page to a keyword) The tricky part comes with incorporating the capacity and resolution options. 1 Browse Capacity Page
(20 sub categories all the same except capacity quantity & products)
1 Browse by Resolution Page
(20 sub categories all the same except resolution value & products) The owner want them, I was going to link from the main widgets page to each of these to give the customer the option. What I can't decide is how to deal with them from an SEO point of view. Should they be no-followed? canonicaled? Can there be any advantage to having so many pages covering slightly different variations or as i suspect it is dangerous to the overall health of the site. To complicate things further, Canonical tags may not be an option due to an old magento version running that doesnt support them. Is there an alternative way around? As always many thanks.0 -
Page Speed
Google recommends a page load speed of 1.4 seconds, is it recommended to have that page speed for every page on the site, or just the landing pages. Is there a tool that will check the load speed of every page on a site and report the slow pages? The free online tools only check one page at a time.
On-Page Optimization | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Wordpress Post as Slideshow - One long page vs many short pages?
We are working on implementing a slideshow format for some of the posts on a website, and it appears that using this format breaks a long post into several shorter pages. That's what we want from a user experience standpoint, but are wondering if there are negative SEO implications from having the content broken up in this way, and whether search engines will view it as one longer page or several very short pages? Here is an example: http://www.forthebestrate.com/10-cheap-ideas-for-summer-fun/ Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | ILM_Marketing0 -
2 Question about URL structure
Hello guys 1 - I have a question about the best structure for URLs from the point of view of SEO: Is it OK to use the URL as mywebsite.com.br/long-tail-article Or is better this mywebsite.com.br/category/long-tail-article 2 - When part of my keyword is already in my "category", for example: mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-is-good I leave it as it is, or in the following way: mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing-is-good NOTE: Do not take into account that this URL would be different from other URLs in this category
On-Page Optimization | | seomasterbrasil0 -
Can I have a strong brand category page and a strong product page?
It seems Google base and other Comparison Shopping Engines like to see the brand in the product name. But, on my category page for that brand, website optimizer tells me including the brand name with each product is cannabilizes links. For example; I have a page for jewelerABC with 20 pieces of jewelry listed as well as original content about jewelerABC. I do not currently name these products as xyz by jewelerABC. This page comes up nicely in the serps. But in Google base The top listings for jewelry by jewelerABC seem to have every product named xyz by jewelerABC or JewelerABC xyzs. What is the best way to optimize.for both? Stephen
On-Page Optimization | | stephenfishman0