Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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 -
Url folder structure
I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature _
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes.
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.0 -
Seo For Forum Sites
I have forum site.I've opened it 2 months ago.But there is a problem.Therefore my content is unique , my site's keyword ranking constantly changing..Sometimes my site's ranking drops from first 500.After came to 70s. I didn't make any off page seo to my site.What is the problem ?
Technical SEO | | tutarmi0 -
Special characters in URL
Hi There, We're in the process of changing our URL structure to be more SEO friendly. Right now I'm struggling to find a good way to handle slashes that are part of a targeted keyword. For example, if I have a product page and my product title is "1/2 ct Diamond Earrings in 14K Gold" which of the following URLs is the right way to go if I'm targeting the product title as the search keyword? example.com/jewelry/1-2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold example.com/jewelry/12-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold example.com/jewelry/1_2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold example.com/jewelry/1%2F2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Richline_Digital0 -
How much will changing IP addresses impact SEO?
So my company is upgrading its Internet bandwidth. However, apparently the vendor has said that part of the upgrade will involve changing our IP address. I've found two links that indicate some care needs to be taken to make sure our SEO isn't harmed: http://followmattcutts.com/2011/07/21/protect-your-seo-when-changing-ip-address-and-server/ http://www.v7n.com/forums/google-forum/275513-changing-ip-affect-seo.html Assuming we don't use an IP address that has been blacklisted by Google for spamming or other black hat tactics, how problematic is it? (Note: The site hasn't really been aggressively optimized yet - I started with the company less than two weeks ago, and just barely got FTP and CMS access yesterday - so honestly I'm not too worried about really messing up the site's optimization, since there isn't a lot to really break.)
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
How much impact does bad html coding really have on SEO?
My client has a site that we are trying to optimise. However the code is really pretty bad. There are 205 errors showing when W3C validating. The >title>, , <keywords> tags are appearing twice. There is truly excessive javascript. And everything has been put in tables.</keywords> How much do you think this is really impacting the opportunity to rank? There has been quite a bit of discussion recently along the lines of is on-page SEO impacting anymore. I just want to be sure before I recommend a whole heap of code changes that could cost her a lot - especially if the impact/return could be miniscule. Should it all be cleaned up? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Chammy0 -
Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase
I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)? Any other tips? EX: http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html OR http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html
Technical SEO | | JustinStupid0 -
Sharepoint SEO - How to lowercase urls with rewrite rules?
We have a borked website running on sharepoint IIS .net that has been at the mercy of many bad developers We have rewrite rules with an ini file for 301s etc. We are struggling to find out or figure out how to lowercase them The lowercase functionality may be native within sharepoint somewhere Any help appreciated! Sorry its so vague S
Technical SEO | | firstconversion0