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.
Does it hurt your SEO to have an inaccessible directory in your site structure?
-
Due to CMS constraints, there may be some nodes in our site tree that are inaccessible and will automatically redirect to their parent folder.
Here's an example: www.site.com/folder1/folder2/content, /folder2 redirects to /folder1. This would only be for the single URL itself, not the subpages (i.e. /folder1/folder2/content and anything below that would be accessible).
Is there any real risk in this approach from a technical SEO perspective? I'm thinking this is likely a non-issue but I'm hoping someone with more experience can confirm.
Another potential option is to have /folder2 accessible (it would be 100% identical to /folder1, long story) and use a canonical tag to point back to /folder1. I'm still waiting to hear if this is possible.
Thanks in advance!
-
Do you know what the redirect type is (301 or 302)? If it is a 301, I wouldn't worry about it. If it is a 302, I'd try and get that changed. Either way, it is unlikely to make a big impact on your site.
-
From what I understand, it sounds like your CMS creates a bunch of 404 pages that then auto-bounce back to their parent folder. But that these are phantom pages that don't exist? My recommendation is to use robots.txt to no follow, no index. If they are blank pages, you can also add that to the blank page's meta data. Canonical tags are always a good idea.
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
-
Shopfiy Technical SEO: Internal Linking Structure
Hi Community, While Shopify’s canonical tag properly points to the preferred version of the URL (i.e./product/product-title), internal links still point to the various non-canonical versions throughout the site. For example, in collection pages, each product thumbnail links to non-canonical URLs (i.e. /collection/collection-title/products/product-title). I know it is not good as we have to keep the linking consistent. So, I read a blog post by Moz and changed the internal link to the canonical URL(i.e./product/product-title). My change is from{{ product.url | within: collection }} to {{ product.url }}. Very interestingly, I can manage the change for some collections but some collections don't work. Can you please suggest how I can change fix the linking for all collection pages? One of the collection example that works: https://shopmtn.eu/collections/dirty-rigger ; One of the collection example that doesn't work: https://shopmtn.eu/collections/truss My Shopify Template: Parallax. THANK YOU VERY MUCHbN1Heqq zoyDPco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media0 -
Looking for SEO advice on Negative SEO attack. Technical SEO
please see this link https://www.dropbox.com/s/thgy57zmmwzodcp/Screenshot 2016-05-31 13.25.23.png?dl=0 you can see my domain is getting tons of chinese spam. I have 410'd the page but it still keeps coming.. 7tnawRV
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattguitar990 -
Is my site being penalized?
I've gone through all the points on https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 but the site only ranks for its brand name after months. The website is not ranking in the top 100 for any main keywords (2,3,4 word phrases), only for a handful of very long phrases (4+). All of the content is unique, all pages are indexed, the website is fast and doesn't contain any crawl errors and there are a couple of links pointing to it. There is a sitewide follow link in the footer pointing to another domain, its parent company and vice-versa. This is not done for any SEO reasons but the companies are related and also the products are supplementary of each other. Could this be an issue? Or is my site being penalized by something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robbern0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
International SEO
Hi all, The company that I work for is planning to target some french (and some other foreign) keywords. The thing is, in our industry, you can't just hire someone to translate the content/pages. The pages have to be translated by an accredited translator. Here's the thing, it costs a LOT of money just to translate a few thousand words. So, the CEO decided to translate a few of our 'core' pages and SEO them to see if it brings results. My questions are, would it be possible from a technical point of view to simply translate a few pages? Would that cause a problem for the search engine crawlers? Would those pages be 'seen' as duplicates? Thanks in advance guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardDennis0 -
On-Site Directory - Delete or Keep?
We have 2 ecommerce sites. Both have been hit by Penguin (no warnings in WMT) and we're in the process of cleaning up backlinks. We have link directories on both sites. They've got links that are relevant to the sites but also links that aren't relevant. And they're big directories - we're talking thousands of links to other sites. What's the best approach here? Do we leave it alone, delete the whole thing, or manually review and keep highly relevant links but get rid of the rest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Multinational SEO
Hi all The situation: We have a .com website that is the core of our business over the last 3 years we have built this into a very sucessful brand. Customers are able to purchase products from our website and have it delivered anywhere in the world. As part of the development of our business we want to obviously rank high within serps regardless of what country our potential customer is from. We understand that we will need to translate much of our website to achieve this and that is something that we have in the pipeline. My question is more aimed at the English speaking countries and how we should optimise our website for these. For example: websitename.com.au and websitename.co.uk were initialy setup as 301 redirects to websitename.com, however, we have now set them up as their own domains which display the exact same content as the .com website. So to clarify the content on websitename.com/product1.html is also on websitename.com.au/product1.html and websitename.co.uk/product1.html What would the best way to ensure that our .com.au and .co.uk gain traction within the appropriate country? Is duplicate content still an issue? All our prices are displayed in USD will this go againts? We use US English (with a sprinkle of chinglish) as our websites copy languange should we change spelling for AU and UK? Does anyone have any case studies and or other reports I can read that may help me find the right solution for us. Thanks Danny
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyCarter0 -
What is the Ideal Structure for User Generated Product Reviews on My Site?
I apologize for the lengthy post, but I need help! Here is my current structure for product reviews: My product pages displays a set number of user product reviews before displaying a link to "see all reviews". So: http://www.domain.com/product/product-page Has product details, specs (usually generic from manufacturer) and 5 user product reviews. If there are more than 5, there is a link to see all reviews: http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=1 Where each page would display 10 user product reviews, and paginate until all user reviews are displayed. I am thinking about using the Rel Canonical tag on the paginated reviews pages to reference back to the main product page. So: http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=1 http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=2 http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=3 Would have the canonical URL of: http://www.domain.com/product/product-page Does this structure make sense? I'm unclear what strategy I should use, but currently the product review pages account for less than 2% of overall organic traffic. Thanks ahead of time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Corp0