Need URL structure suggestions
-
On my website I am in the process of creating expat city guides for different cities in Cambodia. I've already gotten three up, but I am worried that my URL structure is not the best, so I am wondering if I should fix it before I put the rest up.
Right now the city guides are housed here: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/
There's a section for each city, this one is for Battambang: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang
And then there are sections for hotels, restaurants, etc. movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang/battambang-hotels-and-accommodation
So once you finally get to a review for an individual hotel or activity, the URL is really long, like this: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang/battambang-hotels-and-accommodation/classy-hotel
Should I just par the section names down so the URL would be something like this: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ ?
I was hoping by having the long URLs slugs for my section pages, such as "battambang-hotels-and-accommodation" they would be more likely to show on search terms like "Battambang hotels" than if the section was just "accommodation." However, this whole section is getting much less search traffic than anything else on my site, so I am wondering if it is because of these ridiculously long URLs. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
-
Can it be that the traffic from Google are expats? Since it's hard to give people a face solely based on Google Analytics data. Either way you look at it, I think the best solution is the one that services your visitors and is SEO friendly. And if you’re facing the situation you can’t choose between the two, I would always stick with designing for people instead of search engines.
Since search engines are getting pretty smart in detecting unnatural “optimalisation” and a good user experience results indirect in good rankings (dwell time for example) as well.
-
Thank you. The problem is that my target audience (expats in Cambodia or coming to Cambodia) is not my actual audience. For this sort of thing, I get most of my traffic from people coming from Google searches. The site has been up for several years now (although the guides are relatively new) and this pattern has remained steady. I am not sure if I should be designing for the audience I want or the audience I have.
-
Hi Lina,
It would keep the URL's short and descriptive for your visitors and more important in the SERP's which could increase your CTR.
Besides that, my experience is that people look for either an hotel or information about the place. Although they will find the information useful at some point the starting of a search (entering the query in Google) will focus on either information about the place or information about the hotels.
This way I would split the information on your website as well and make sure you point your visitors to it with internal links or buttons.
That’s just my point of view, asking your target audience about this is a great way to make decisions as well!
-
I could, but it would ruin my sidebars. Also, my idea is that people will be looking at all of the stuff for one particular city, so it makes sense to keep each city in its own subfolder.
What do you think the advantage is to having the hotels in their own subfolder? I was thinking about re-doing the sidebars manually anyway (right now they are automatic based on the Wordpress structure)
-
-
Hi Lina,
Can't you just make a page for city guides and one for hotels and use those as head pages and put the rest under those?
So
head page: hotels
under that: battambang and under that one the classy hotels page
And for the guide something like:
head page: expat city's
under that: battanbang guide
Just an idea, good luck with redirecting!
-
-
Thank you! I use the term hotels much more, but I used 'accommodation and hotels' because some of the places are guesthouses, not hotels, etc.
I'm using Wordpress so there's no easy way for me to get the /expat-city-and-island-guides/ out of the URL, but I can shorten it to /expat-city-guides/ or even /city-guides/. I might keep expat because it's an important keyword for me. For the same reason (Wordpress structure) I can't move battambang after accommodations without changing the whole site structure (and design) which I don't think I am willing to do.
I think I'll try movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/hotels/classy-hotel
Seems more manageable and readable. Now I just need to set up 301s on all of the old pages....eep.
-
Hi Lina500,
I think you’re right about changing this before moving on. In any website we develop website structure comes before content creation.
I understand your concern about keywords in the URL and the length of the URL. The current URL is pretty confusing for your visitors and is probably too long to read.
Gladly for you, Google doesn’t put too much weight on keywords in your URL and they are getting better and better at understanding what pages are about. A Word like accommodations will be known as a close variant of hotels for example. This way a descriptive URL is just fine.
In your situation I would find out what words are used most. For example:
Accommodations vs hotels
Island guides vs city guides
If the most searched keyword describes the page I would pick that one. If however the other keyword fits the content of that page best I would pick the other keyword.
Your own suggestion movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ seems like a pretty good one to me.
I would only skip /expat-city-guides/ and make it movetocambodia.com/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ since these are keywords that get used combined. People won’t search for city guide classy hotel for example.
In the ideal situation I would go for /expat city guides/battambang/ for the city guides and put your accommodation overview under /accommodations/battambang/classy-hotel/ (without /expat-city-guides/ before it.).
I hope this helps!
-
I'd suggest you to incorporate "Breadcrumbs" approach in managing your links for search engines as you can easily map your link structure. It will be something like this:
expat-city-and-island-guides >> battambang >> battambang-hotels-and-accommodation >>classy-hotel
As far as the current links are concerned, I don't think you need to insert city names in URL multiple times. Come up with descriptive but short URL for each page as you've already implemented the "Breadcrumbs", search engines will understand how your site is structured.
For more info about Breadcrumbs, check out this post from Ann Smarty:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/breadcrumbs/15022/ -
Thanks! Just had a look at these links, very helpful. In my above examples, do you think having the city name in the URL more than once makes it look spammy? I am not sure if I should change these since the pages are already up for a few months or if I should just be more brief in the new guides.
-
Hey Lina,
I'd suggest you to take a look at these posts from Rand for better understanding,
https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
https://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urlsHonestly speaking, the long URLs doesn't bother search engines, they can process them without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and UX.
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
-
Can you help by advising how to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my website with a 404 errorplease?
How to stop a URL from referring to another URL on my site. I'm getting a 404 error on a referred URL which is (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/[null id=43484])referred from URL (https://webwritinglab.com/know-exactly-what-your-ideal-clients-want-in-8-easy-steps/) The referred URL is the URL page that I want and I do not need it redirecting to the other URL as that's presenting a 404 error. I have tried saving the permalink in WordPress and recreated the .htaccess file and the problem is still there. Can you advise how to fix this please? Is it a case of removing the redirect? Is this advisable and how do I do that please? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
Trailing Slashes on URLs
Hi everyone I have a question on trailing slashes in URL. The crux of it is this: is having both: example.com/subdirectory/ and: example.com/subdirectory on all of your subdirectories considered duplicate content by Google - or in some other way really bad? We have done a heck a lot of research into this, and it would seem...no one knows for sure (it is easy to get lost in a sea of Webmaster tool forums from 2012). Google itself has both URLs for it's subdirectories (try https://www.google.co.uk/maps and https://www.google.co.uk/maps/) as does Moz; and yet there are some rumblings on the internet of people who think you must put a 'redirect' (although not really a redirect as it isn't a 301) in your htaccess file to one or the other (so for example.com/subdirectory/ would 'forward' to example.com/subdirectory); and this is what bbc.co.uk do. We tried putting this htaccess 'forward' in as an experiment, but I noticed our site then stopped being fully crawled by Google bot, so we reversed it. Can any one shed any light?
Technical SEO | | NickOrbital0 -
Making URLs automatically clickable
Hi all, I have a PHP function which i use to make all links clickable. Problem is, if some one writes a link in a a-tag, the URL inside the href value is made clickable. Not good. Can someone perhaps help me with the issue? Function: function makeClickableLinks($text)
Technical SEO | | rasmusbang
{
$text = preg_replace('/<//', ' $text = preg_replace('(
)', '
', $text);
$text = preg_replace('!((https?://www.|https?://|www.)(([a-z0-9-]+.)+[a-z]{2,6})(/\S+|/)*)!ie', '"[".shortenurl("\1")."]("".(strtolower('$2'))"', $text);
$text = str_replace('( <a href',="" '<a="" $text);<br="">$text = str_replace(')" target', '" target', $text);
$text = str_replace('):" target', '" target', $text);
$text = str_replace(')..." target', '" target', $text);
$text = str_replace(').." target', '" target', $text);
$text = str_replace(')." target', '" target', $text);
return $text;
}</a> <a href',="" '<a="" $text);<br="">Pleeeeease heeelp 🙂 Can't fix it on my own - been at it for ages. -Rasmus</a>0 -
Do I need a link to my sitemap?
I have a very large sitemap. I submit it to both Google and Bing, but do I need a link to it? If someone went there it would probably lock their browser. Is there any danger of not having a link if I submit it to Google and Bing?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Www or not www base url
Here is the situation. Developer custom coded a magento commerce shop for a seo client and is having problems adding www to the URL without breaking the site. They wont be able to get this completed until a couple months down the road. We are starting monthly SEO this June. Most directories and websites link to the www version of a site not the non www. What should I expect since we are ranking for the non-www and linking to the www version. In web master tools i'm telling google to display the URL as www.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Is the Sandbox Real? Need Help!
To start, I'm very new at this so I've likely made a ton of mistakes but here is the breakdown of what's happened/what's been done to my site. I own a wedding photography company which was based in Portland, we decided about six months prior that we wanted to relocate to San Diego. It was too soon to optimize our website for our new town of San Diego so I created a brand new site. It was born around June 2011. It looks just like the old site but all the content is different (different titles, re-uploaded images, text, etc was optimized for San Diego). What may be my pitfall is I imported our blog posts from the old site to the new site and we continued to keep both blogs live (writing the post in one, importing to the other). San Diego site: http://continuumweddings.com Old Site (now optimized for LA): http://continuumphotography.com From there I began link building. I signed up for the SEO Scheduler and began making the changes suggested there. It told me to sign up for Linxboss, and I did it. Other than that, my links have been build naturally and I have quite a few of them, definitely enough to compete with my top competitors. At one point I was #3 for "San Diego Wedding Photographer" and I stayed there for a couple weeks. Then I began to drop. Now I'm somewhere on page 10. I've read a lot of articles on here and I know I have a lot of things potentially hurting me. Site age, Duplicate content, etc. I'm just not sure why I dropped (still rank on 1st page in Yahoo & Bing) and what I should do about it. I tend to get overwhelmed and every post I read seems to talk about something new I may have done wrong. I'm willing to put in the time to fix this; I just need to know where my time is best spent.
Technical SEO | | mrsmelmitch0 -
Negative url name?
I have a new client who has the letters "BB" at the start of his url name, bbzautorepair.com. He was told by someone at Google Adwords that the letters "BB" in his url name could hurt him with Google rankings. Reason being that Google red flags anything or website to do with firearms, guns and ammunition. He was told that the letters "BB" could be mistaken or red flagged for "BB Gun". Seems a bit far fetched. Has anyone every heard of such a thing? Thanks
Technical SEO | | fun52dig
Gary Downey0 -
URL Structure "-" vs "/"? Are there any advantages to one over the other?
An example would be domain.com/keyword/keyword2 vs domain.com/keyword-keyword2 Are there any advantages / disadvantages to one over the other?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0