URL / sitemap structure for support pages
-
I am creating a site that has four categories housed in folders off of the TLD.
Example:
example.com/category-1
example.com/category-2
example.com/category-3
example.com/category-4Those category folders contain sub-folders that house the products inside each category.
Example:
example.com/category-1/product-1
example.com/category-2/product-1
etc.Each of the products have a corresponding support page with technical information, FAQs, etc. I have three options as to how to structure the support pages' URLs.
Option 1 - Add new sub-folder with "support" added to string:
example.com/category-1/product-1-support
Option 2 - Add a second sub-folder off of the product sub-folder for support:
example.com/category-1/product-1/support
Option 3 - Create a "support" folder with product sub-folders:
Which of these three options would you choose? I don't like having one large /support folder that houses all products. It seems like this would create a strange crawling and UX situation. The sitemap would have a huge /support folder with all of my products in it and the keywords in my category folders would be replaced with the word "support."
Because I would rather have the main product pages ranking over any of the support pages (outside of searches containing the word "support"), I am leaning toward Option 2: example.com/category-1/product-1/support. I think this structure indicates to crawlers that the more important page is the product page, while the support page is secondary to that. It also makes it clear to users that this is the support page for that particular product.
Does anyone have any experience or perspective on this? I'm open to suggestions and if I'm overthinking it, tell me that too.
Thanks, team.
-
Agree with Dirk. You can use links to show the structure more effectively than the URLs per se.
-
Hi,
To be very honest - I don't think crawlers are looking at the way you structure your url's. In my opinion these 3 options are equally valid and it depends on your personal preference how you want to organise it. Also think about your reporting needs - it's very easy in Analytics to put filters based on folders (or to use the drill-down reporting)
What is more important is how you make this information accessible for the users - which is completely unrelated to the url.
Like Bryan mentioned - it could be useful to have a support section on your site - regrouping all the support documents for all the products on your site. Again - this could be done regardless of your choice of url's.To determine the importance of a page crawlers are mainly looking at two things:
- how many links does this page get (both internal and external)
- how many clicks do I need to get from the homepage to this particular page
The relevance is also determined by factors like appearance of keyword in url, H1,...etc all the basic stuff - but these would again be identical for the 3 scenario's you propose.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
That depends on the UX and UI. If it makes sense that someone looking at one support document may be interested in others, or other support-related content in general, I would absolutely go with Option 3. However, if the product support pages are absolutely meant to only be related to the specific product, then Option 1 or 2 (which sound like they're the same thing) would be fruitful.
I, myself, would go with Option 3 without question. But it really depends on your navigation and such.
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
-
Sitemaps, 404s and URL structure
Hi All! I recently acquired a client and noticed in Search Console over 1300 404s, all starting around late October this year. What's strange is that I can access the pages that are 404ing by cutting and pasting the URLs and via inbound links from other sites. I suspect the issue might have something to do with Sitemaps. The site has 5 Sitemaps, generated by the Yoast plugin. 2 Sitemaps seem to be working (pages being indexed), 3 Sitemaps seem to be not working (pages have warnings, errors and nothing shows up as indexed). The pages listed in the 3 broken sitemaps seem to be the same pages giving 404 errors. I'm wondering if auto URL structure might be the culprit here. For example, one sitemap that works is called newsletter-sitemap.xml, all the URLs listed follow the structure: http://example.com/newsletter/post-title Whereas, one sitemap that doesn't work is called culture-event-sitemap.xml. Here the URLs underneath follow the structure http://example.com/post-title. Could it be that these URLs are not being crawled / found because they don't follow the structure http://example.com/culture-event/post-title? If not, any other ideas? Thank you for reading this long post and helping out a relatively new SEO!
Technical SEO | | DanielFeldman0 -
Sitemap
Hi, I have generated a dynamic sitemap and submit it in search console, but there is a huge gap between the number of submitted pages and the number of indexed pages. 143,206 URLs submitted 2,151 URLs indexedwhy we have this gap and what should I do to reduce it?
Technical SEO | | Digikala0 -
URL structure change for pages without traffic: 301 redirect or not ?
Hi, I am just starting with MOZ PRO and trying to handle the high priority issues, starting with pages with 4XX Client Error. I am wondering what we should do with pages with no traffic and no external links. For instance: So time ago we change the URL structure of our blog to a flatter one, and so eg we moved a page: from: domain-name/dla-rodzicow/poradniki/poradniki-po-markach/vilac/vilac-zabawki-z-dusza to: domain-name/dla-rodzicow/poradniki/marka-vilac/vilac-zabawki-z-dusza/ Still not very flat but this is not the point. MOZ PRO shows we are having internal links to the old url. According to MOZ PRO, we don't have external links. According to Analytics we have no traffic on the old page. So now we changed the internal link, and I am wondering whether we should 301 redirect the old page to the new one, or whether a sitemap update is enough for this kind of pages ? Thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | isabelledylag0 -
My client is using a mobile template for their local pages and the Google search console is reporting thousands of duplicate titles/meta descriptions
So my client has 2000+ different store locations. Each location has the standard desktop location and my client opted for a corresponding mobile template for each location. Now the Google search console is reporting thousands of duplicate titles/meta descriptions. However this is only because the mobile template and desktop store pages are using the exact same title/meta description tag. Is Google penalizing my client for this? Would it be worth it to update the mobile template title/meta description tags?
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Does Bing support a news sitemap yet?
With Bing's new app that will integrate their news feed into Facebook, I'd like to optimize for inclusion in Bing news pickup. Does Bing accept news sitemaps yet?
Technical SEO | | Aggie0 -
Mobile Site Domain/URL Structure
We are currently building a mobile optimised version of our main website and I had some questions with regard to SEO. 1. Is it best to structure the domain as: m.yourdomain.com yourdomain/m 2. It is correct to place rel="cannonical" on the mobile pages and to have only the main site indexed? Thanks in advance and links or books on mobile seo you can direct me to that would be greatly appreciated. Phil
Technical SEO | | Phily0 -
Can URL re writes fix the problem of critical content too deep in a sites structure?
Good morning from Wetherby UK 🙂 Ok imagine this scenario. You ask the developers to design a site where "offices to let" is on level two of a sites hierachy and so the URL would look like this: http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/office-to-let. But Yikes when it goes live it ends up like this: http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk...s/residential/office-to-let Is a fix to this a URL re - write? Or is the only fix relocating the office to let content further up the site structure? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Page title vs page element
Hello! I'm new to SEO as my question would imply. Can someone show me the difference between a page title and a page element? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | atrenary1