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:
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.
-
Hi Eric,
I am sharing one article on how site can have structured URLs. This article explained exact issue that you have mentioned in your question.
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/structured-urls/
Thanks
-
Hi Eric. I'd recommend using folders as being navigational and/or site-section specific. As such, they can be shorter--like the two letter abbreviation for states--and create less worries about URL length that way. A ton of other signals are going to be contributing to a page being recognized as being about a resort in Florida than FL vs Florida in the URL alone.
Once you have your structure figured out, using hyphenated URLs that often mimic the title tag of the page is generally a best practice as this gives the user the best idea of what a link is about while also containing keywords when someone links to the page solely via URL. The Moz blog has plenty of examples such as: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data.. Short domain, short folder name, then the content. Each bit is readable and understandable as to why it's there.
See: http://moz.com/learn/seo/url for more. Cheers!
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
-
After you remove a 301 redirect that Google has processed, will the new URL retain any of the link equity from the old URL?
Lets say you 301 redirect URL A to URL B, and URL A has some backlinks from other sites. Say you left the 301 redirect in place for a year, and Google had already replaced the old URL with the new URL in the SERPs, would the new URL (B) retain some of the link equity from URL A after the 301 redirect was removed, or does the redirect have to remain in place forever?
Technical SEO | | johnwalkersmith0 -
Same URL for languages sub-directories
Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages, example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Clean URL vs. Parameter URL and Using Canonical URL...That's a Mouthfull!
Hi Everyone, I a currently migrating a Magento site over to Shopify Plus and have a question about best practices for using the canonical URL. There is a competitor that I believe is not doing it the correct way, so I want to make sure my way is the better choice. With 'Vendor Pages' in Shopify, they show up looking like: https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/vendors?q=Cellucor. Not as clean. Problem is that Shopify also creates https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/cellucor. Same products, same page, just a different more clean URL. I am seeing both indexed in Google. What I want to do is basically create a canonical URL from the URL with the parameter that points to the clean URL. The two pages are very similar. The only difference is that the clean URL page has some additional content at the top of the page. I would say the two pages are 90% the same. Do you see any issue with that?
Technical SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Change URL or use Canonicals and Redirects?
We just completed a conclusive a/b test on a client's landing page. The new page saw a 30% bump in conversions, yay! Now what? Option 1: Change the url of the new page to that of the old page, retire the old page. Option 2: Redirect the old page and anything that was pointing to it to the new page, make the new page the canonical. I'm afraid of option 1 because I think Google's WTF penalty will be a bit harsher than option 2, but I wanted to sanity check that here. Any thoughts or experienced advice would be very appreciated!
Technical SEO | | LindsayDayton0 -
Changing URL of posts
HI, I need to change the urls and permalink structure of my blogposts. How I have to deal all this with google? Do I have to re-submit the pages to google with fetch as google? Will google display duplicate content of the same article ( having changed the url) or will it automatically replace the old url with the new ones? Tx for your support guys!
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
Removing a lot of content & changing url structure.
I recently moved an existing ecommerce site, which I recently purchased, from Volusion to Shopify. The new site has a completely different link structure. The old site also had about 120 products which are not even close to being up to par with the products I now have on the site. So I had to remove all of those pages too. I was just wondering which measures I need to take to deal with this? I created a really nice 404 page. I also 301 redirected the pages which still exist. But I was wondering if there is anything else I should do? Should I request a removal of all the old pages, which no longer exist? Should I do something else I'm not thinking about? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. jim
Technical SEO | | PedroAndJobu0 -
Structure of urls
**Hallo from Athens, Greece. We have to implement the following project and i need your help: ** We will build a company guide for the whole country and company local guides for each city for the same client. **Information of the country guide is the sum of information of local guides, so when a user is at the country guide he sees information from companies from all cities and when the user is at city guide he sees info only for the city. ** The problem is the structure of the url we should have. Should the page of presentation of each company should have structure as domain.gr/id/company? or city.domain.gr/id/company and the one to be canonical to the other? is this good for seo? Should both urls be included in the sitemap? Thank you
Technical SEO | | herculesopa0 -
New URL or Folder Off Existing Site
I am working on a project that is promoting dining in a particular region of the southwest for a destination marketing company. The parent Web site is an authority in the region and ranks well for almost all terms related to the leisure experience in the region. A completely separate Web site was built to promote this culinary program as it involves a committee of different stakeholders, but it’s solely focused on the region. My question is this. The site is on a different CMS, etc., but the overall experience on the site is similar to the parent DMO site in terms of creative. The client has a brand new domain that they purchased for this initiative, but we are also considering mapping the parent site URL to the new culinary site. Parent: www.regionalsite.com New Themed Site: www.regionalsite.com/theme/ Or www.themeurl.com My fear is that if I take the approach of the new URL that it will take forever for the site to build any link clout at all, as the client doesn’t really get the fact that working a link strategy is so critical. However, I know that having links from the regional site over to the theme URL will have an impact. Also, if I do take the approach of mapping the URL to a new folder off of the parent domain, do I risk that 2<sup>nd</sup> tier links on the micro-site will have a challenge indexing as they will essentially be on tier 3? Any advice would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | VERBInteractive0