SEO impact of the anatomy of URL subdirectory structure?
-
I've been pushing hard to get our Americas site (DA 34) integrated with our higher domain authority (DA 51) international website. Currently our international website is setup in the following format...
The problem that I am facing is that I need my development framework installed in it's own directory. It cannot be at the root of the website (website.com) since that is where the other websites (us-en, fr-fr, etc.) are being generated from. Though we will have control of /us-en/ after the integration I cannot use that as the website main directory since the americas website is going to be designed for scalability (eventually adopting all regions and languages) so it cannot be region specific. What we're looking at is website.com/[base]/us-en. I'm afraid that if base has any length to it in terms of characters it is going to dilute the SEO value of whatever comes after it in the URL (website.com/[base]/us-en/store/product-name.html).
Any recommendations?
-
I see. In that case, sure, any short folder would be fine. Maybe even 'a' as it reads a little nice: website.com/a/us-en/store/product-name.html. Reads like, "Website, a US, English language store with the product named X." Someone seeing the link would have a pretty good idea of what it is going to be.
-
Length of url & number of folders have some importance (see also http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls - point 6 & 11) but I don't think they are major ranking factors.
What is important however is the depth of the site (how many clicks needed to reach the content you are integrating) - As you are integrating a old site on in another domain - I would try to make sure that you have sufficient crosslinks between the part you are integrating & the existing content. If you only have 1 link from the home to the "integrated" site, you'll be moving the old content one step deeper in the structure, which might have a considerable impact on your ranking (I was unfortunate enough to experience it on one of my sites)
-
Thanks for the feedback Ryan. I may not have been very clear in my response - I know I was bouncing all over the place. usa cannot be my base URL for scalability reasons. Slowly we'll start adopting other countries websites so the top-level subdirectory needs to be broad enough to not restrict us to a specific part of the world.
My intitial thought is to opt for something like website.com/M/us-en or website.com/-/us-en where the base directory is short in hopes that it doesn't dilute the value of SEO terms later in the URL such as website.com/M/us-en/store/product-name.html. Is that something to worry about?
-
How about website.com/usa/en/ (instead of /us-en/)? Or you could use na for North America if that's your region.
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
-
Japanese URL-structured sitemap (pages) not being indexed by Bing Webmaster Tools
Hello everyone, I am facing an issue with the sitemap submission feature in Bing Webmaster Tools for a Japanese language subdirectory domain project. Just to outline the key points: The website is based on a subdirectory URL ( example.com/ja/ ) The Japanese URLs (when pages are published in WordPress) are not being encoded. They are entered in pure Kanji. Google Webmaster Tools, for instance, has no issues reading and indexing the page's URLs in its sitemap submission area (all pages are being indexed). When it comes to Bing Webmaster Tools it's a different story, though. Basically, after the sitemap has been submitted ( example.com/ja/sitemap.xml ), it does report an error that it failed to download this part of the sitemap: "page-sitemap.xml" (basically the sitemap featuring all the sites pages). That means that no URLs have been submitted to Bing either. My apprehension is that Bing Webmaster Tools does not understand the Japanese URLs (or the Kanji for that matter). Therefore, I generally wonder what the correct way is to go on about this. When viewing the sitemap ( example.com/ja/page-sitemap.xml ) in a web browser, though, the Japanese URL's characters are already displayed as encoded. I am not sure if submitting the Kanji style URLs separately is a solution. In Bing Webmaster Tools this can only be done on the root domain level ( example.com ). However, surely there must be a way to make Bing's sitemap submission understand Japanese style sitemaps? Many thanks everyone for any advice!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
PDF Optimization Question: Does URL Structure Matter?
Hi Mozzers: I am optimizing a bunch of PDF brochures within a client's website. Besides the typical optimization tactics I'm applying, (like these) I have a question regarding the file/url structure of the PDFs themselves. By default, the client is locating PDFs in an 'uploads' folder of their Wordpress site. So, a typical PDF might have a URL such as: https://www.Xyzinsurance.com/xyz-content/uploads/2015/06/Brochure-XYZ-Connect.pdf My question: is there any advantage in eliminating all these sub-directories and moving the files into a main folder, simply titled '/brochures' ?? Any insights or conjecture would be welcome!
Technical SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Seo Yoast Plugin
In Yoast seo plugin, under the general settings is Sitewide meta settings,under which there is an option to either check or leave unchecked Noindex subpages of archives which says: If you want to prevent /page/2/ and further of any archive to show up in the search results, enable this. I am very confuse if to check or not. What is the best seo practice? Most of our posts are in categories which have 2-4 pages.
Technical SEO | | VillasDiani0 -
If a permanent redirect is supposed to transfer SEO from the old page to the new page, why has my domain authority been impacted?
For example, we redirected our old domain to a new one (leaving no duplicate content on the old domain) and saw a 40% decrease in domain authority. Isn't a permanent redirect supposed to transfer link authority to the place it is redirecting to? Did I do something wrong?
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
SEO for a franchise business
Were about to embark on an SEO project for a franchise business with about 150 franchises. Would it be best to give all of the franchises individual domain names or house them under the one domain? If they were on the same domain would it be worth setting them up with sub domains or with a URL so city.mydomain.com vs mydomain.com/city Thanks
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
What are your thoughts on Twylah and SEO?
I recently signed up for Twylah. If you are not familiar with it, Twylah creates a summary of all your tweets, which you can then add to your site to make them easily accessible for humans and for search engines. On first glance I am really liking this idea, however after adding Twylah to our site, our crawl diagnostics took a major spike in errors and alerts: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/90501/static/Diagnostics%20After%20Twylah.png Here is our Twylah page: http://tweets.hingeheads.com I am not a SEO expert, but the number of errors is worrying me. Are we getting penalized by Search Engines/Google because of the high number in errors/alerts? Curious to hear your thoughts. P.S. I have fwd this to the Twylah team. They will get back to me in the next few days.Diagnostics%20After%20Twylah.png
Technical SEO | | hingeheads0 -
Variables in URLS?
How much do variables in URLs hurt indexing of that page? I'm worried that with this huge string of variables that the pages won't get indexed. Here's what I think we should have: http://adomainname.com/New/Local/State/City/Make/Model/ Here's the current URL:http://adomainname.com/New/Local/MN/Bayport/Jeep/Liberty?curPage=1&pageResultSize=50&orderDir=DESC&orderBy=ModifiedDate&conditionId=1&makeId=7&modelId=141&stateProvinceName=Minnesota&mc=1
Technical SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
If multiple links on a page point to the same URL, and one of them is no-followed, does that impact the one that isn't?
Page A has two links on it that both point to Page B. Link 1 isn't no-follow, but Link 2 is. Will Page A pass any juice to Page B?
Technical SEO | | Jay.Neely0