Confused: Url Restructure
-
Hello,
We're giving our website a bit of a spring clean in terms of SEO. The site is doing ok, but after the time invested in SEO, content and last year's migration of multiple sites into one, we're not seeing the increase in traffic we had hoped.
Our current urls look something like this:
/a-cake-company/cup-cakes/strawberry
We have the company name as the first level as we with the migration we migrated many companies into one site. What we're considering is testing some pages with a structure like this:
/cup-cakes/cup-cake-company-strawberry
So we'll lose a level and we'll focus more on the category of the product rather than the brand.
What's your thoughts on this? We weren't going to do a mass change yet, just a test, but is this something we should be focusing on? In terms of organisation our current url structure is perfect, but what about from an SEO point of view? In terms of keywords customers are looking for both options.
Thanks!
-
Hi again Harry
Here's what I would do.
I would take a look at the following resources:
On-Page Factors (Moz)
The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites (KISSmetrics)
17 Essential SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Sites (Inc)
Technical Site Audit Checklist: 2015 Edition (Moz)There are probably opportunities beyond your URL structure that you are missing - your URL structure and depth (you're not going that deep at all) alone won't hurt your PA and DA the way you think it will.
Do a quick honest assessment of the layout and content of your website and see where you can enhance areas.
Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck!
-
Thanks Patrick!
They are all separate companies and our customer deals with all the different brands, so we have to keep them all separate.
We currently are using:** /cake-company/cupcakes/type-of-cupcake **as suggested, but we're worried it's too far down by the time you get to the product?
We've seen the PA be significantly reduced by being this deep and wonder if it has any other effect SEO wise?
Thank you!
-
Hi again
I see - sorry about that!
If you are showcasing different companies on your site then it should be...
/cake-company/cupcakes/type-of-cupcake
Apologies on that. Out of curiosity - are all of these companies separate and active companies? Or did they all merge into one larger company? Or is this like a listing website of different companies an their products?
-
Thanks for your response Patrick!
The problem we have is that because we represent 8 brands, these aren't in our domain, so in order to include the domain we currently have those as level one, e.g.:
/cake-company-1
/cake-company-2
/cake-company-3etc...
Our current url structure allows us to have the site neatly organised under each manufacturer of our products, but this then makes the urls quite long and deep.
Would you suggest combining the brand with the product it's self so that they are both in the url and this therefore reduces the url by one level?
E.g. - /cake-company-1-cup-cakes/strawberry
That way we can have:
/cake-company-2-cup-cakes/strawberry
/cake-company-3-cup-cakes/strawberry
/cake-company-4-cup-cakes/strawberryEtc?
Thanks!
-
Hi there
If it were upto me, I would suggest the URLs going something like this:
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/strawberry
This tells me the brand, the type of product, and then a specific product. The beauty here is you can do it with all of your products (if you have more):
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/carrot-cake
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/strawberry-lemonade
www.brandname.com/cakes/bundtIf you have variations below cupcake but above flavor, you can add that between cupcakes and flavors, so:
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/variation/flavors
or...
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/best-sellers/flavors
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/favorites/flavorsEither way, I wouldn't put your company name as a folder path because it should already be in the domain of your website.
Here are some more resources if you want to read a bit more into URL structures - here is a great resource as well from Rand - I suggest doing so!
Hope this helps a bit! Let me know if you have any questions or comments - good luck!
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
-
Full title in url
Hi to all, what is the best url structure, to have all words in the url or to tweak url like Yoast suggest? If we remove some words from url , not focus keyword but stop words and other keywords to have shorter url will that impact search rankings? example.com/one-because-two-for-three-on-four - long url, moz crawl error, yoast red light example.com/one-two-three-four - moz ok, yoast ok Where one is a focus keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WalterHalicki0 -
Same content different URL - Google Analytics other Options
One of my clients came to me today asking to mirror their current website and host it on a different domain (i.e domain.com and domain.ca). Their reasoning is that there is no actual way to confirm via form entries from their website which visitors are submitting the form from an organic perspective and which ones are submitting the form through an Adwords ad campaign referral they are running (which I have nothing to do with). I know Google Analytics will show you visits to pages on a site and then you can find out which source (organic vs. cpc) they came from, but it won't confirm the source on the actual form entry. So my client feels the only way to find out this information would be to mirror the website so that the separate analytics would validate their Ad spend. Does anyone know of any tools that I could use for something like this? I do NOT want to mirror the website as I am fearful of duplicate content and the YEARS of organic SEO work I have put into this website going to waste. The other element I should mention is the client only wants to have this "mirorred" site up for 2 months. Any thoughts, suggestions and arguments for a mirorred website are welcomed! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Duplicate content on URL trailing slash
Hello, Some time ago, we accidentally made changes to our site which modified the way urls in links are generated. At once, trailing slashes were added to many urls (only in links). Links that used to send to
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
example.com/webpage.html Were now linking to
example.com/webpage.html/ Urls in the xml sitemap remained unchanged (no trailing slash). We started noticing duplicate content (because our site renders the same page with or without the trailing shash). We corrected the problematic php url function so that now, all links on the site link to a url without trailing slash. However, Google had time to index these pages. Is implementing 301 redirects required in this case?1 -
Demoting a URL (not-WMT Related)
I have a pharmaceutical brand that treats two diseases, but wants to primarily promote one. We want searches for "brand dosing" to go to Side A, but currently "brand dosing" goes to Side B. BUT, I want "brand dosing Side B" to still show up in organic search, so a noindex on Side B, or canonicalization of Side A, won't work. Essentially, I want any searches that are not specific to a disease treatment to go to Side A, and then specific Side B related searches, go to Side B. Because this is a client paying me to optimize their site, I obviously want to optimize their whole site, so only optimizing Side A, or unoptimizing Side B, aren't solutions I want to employ. I don't think a solution exists, but I figured my fellow Mozers would know best. Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GTO_Pharma_SEO0 -
Domain.com/old-url to domain.com/new-url
HI, I have to change old url`s to new one, for the same domain and all landing pages will be the same: domain.com/old-url I have to change to: domain.com/new-url All together more than 70.000 url. What is best way to do that? should I use 301st redirect? is it possible to do in code or how? what could you please suggest? Thank you, Edgars
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edzjus3330 -
Numbers (2432423) in URL
Hello All Mozers, Quick question on URL. I know URL is important and should include keywords and all that but my question is does including numbers (not date or page numbers but numbers for internal use) in the URL affect SEO? For example, www.domain.com/screw-driver,12,1,23345.htm Is that any better or worse than www.domain.com/screw-driver.htm? I understand that this is not user friendly but in SEO stand point does it hurt ranking? What's your opinion on this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TommyTan0 -
Ending URLs in .html versus /
Hi there! Currently all the URLs on my website, even the home page, end it .html, such as http://www,consumerbase.com/index.html Is this bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Is there any benefit to this? Should I remove it and just have them end with a forward slash?
If I 301 redirect the old .html URLs to the forward slash URLs, will I lose PA? Thanks!0 -
Help me choose a new URL structure
Good morning SEOMoz. I have a huge website, with hundreds of thousands of pages. The websites theme is mobile phone downloads. I want to create a better URL structure. Currently an example url is /wallpaper/htc-wildfire-wallpapers.html My issue with this, first and foremost is it's a little spammy, for example the fact it's in a wallpaper folder, means I shouldn't really need to be explicit with the filename, as it's implied. Another issue arises with the download page. For example /wallpaper/1234/file-name-mobile-wallpaper.html Again it's spammy but also the file ID, is at folder level, rather than within the filename. Making the file deeper and loses structure. I am considering creating sub domains, based on model, to ensure a really tight silo. i.e htc.domain.com/wallpaper/wildfire/ and the download page would be htc.domain.com/wallpaper/file-name-id/ But due to restrictions with the CMS, this would involve a lot of work and so I am considering just cleaning up the url structure without sub domains. /wallpaper/htc/wildfire/ and the download page would be /wallpaper/file-name-id/ What are your thoughts? Somebody suggested having the downloads in no folder at all, but surely it makes sense for a wallpaper, to be in a wallpaper folder and an app to be in an app folder? If they were not in a folder, I'd need to be more explicit in the naming of the files. Any advice would be awesome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0