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?
-
Lots of great feedback has been offered. In short, it's up to your personal preference.
I can't help but add a link because I have watched too many Matt Cutts videos (they are starting to auto-play in my head) and he answered your exact question.
-
the /keyword/ tells the search engine that you have a folder, the other does not. If your Keyword1 has a lot of sub/related keywords then creating a folder would be helpful. Google does search the index files of your folders... without being prompted to.
If you don't have a legit sub category then I would stick with the -.
-
The beginners guide to seo is a great place to start in terms of how to structure your URLs. I personally avoid the "domain.com/keyword/keyword2" type of URL structure. I'd stick with the latter format, but would make sure to not keyword stuff. Just keep it simple with one or two keywords as you mentioned. It's really ugly when you see a url that looks like http://www.domain.com/keyword-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4-keyword5-keyword6-keyword7. I know I hate it when I see those URLs show up in the SERPS. I believe Rand touched on this in The Future of LInk Building webinar from a while back.
-
Well your first example would be referencing 2 separate directories, where the second example is one directory.
Here's a quick snippet of an article from Rand. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls
These last examples have done nearly everything right:
- http://www.discoverohio.com/visitors/map.asp
Brilliant - it's short, descriptive, static and obvious. - http://web.mit.edu/is/usability/usability-guidelines.html
Despite the subdomain, everything else is near perfect. - http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/jk35.html
I'm letting the White House off the hook for not using "john-kennedy" as the page title, because they've wisely also provided his number (the US' 35th President).
- http://www.discoverohio.com/visitors/map.asp
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
-
Is this a true rel=nofollow for the whole article? "printfriendly.com" is part of the URL which is why I'm confused.
Is the rel=nofollow tag on this article a true NoFollow for the whole article (and all the external links to other sites in the article), or is it just for a specific part of the page? Here is the article: https://www.aplaceformom.com/blog/americans-are-not-ready-for-retirement/ The reason I ask is that I'm confused about the code since it has "printfriendly.com..." as a portion of the URL. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | dklarse0 -
From: http://www. to https://
Hi all, I am changing my hosting for legal and SEO reasons from http://www to https:// . Now I hear different stories on the redirects: 1: should i try and change my backlinks? 2: internally all links will be 301 redirected at first. Than I want to (manually) change them. It;s within Wordpress so there should be a plugin for this. Tips? 3: Will it affect my rankings and for what period? What I now know that at first it will drop little but eventually you will rank higher than before. Thanks so much in advance! Tymen
Technical SEO | | Tymen1 -
Wordpress "incoming search terms" plugin
Hello everyone! newbie to SEO and have been trying to keep everything nice and ethical but I've seen on a couple of blogs today "incoming search terms" at the bottom of the blogs, then a bullet pointed list of search terms beneath it. So I had a quick search about the use of it and noticed wordpress has a plugin that automatic ally generates these "incoming search terms". I ask is this a legitimate plugin or will this harm my blog? I assume it generally will as I can't see this being much use for the audience, rather it would be 100% for trying to lure in search engines.
Technical SEO | | acecream0 -
Fixing a wordpress 404 error for /feed and /comments/feed?
I have a wordpress site that does not have a blog currently. I'm getting a 404 for /feed and /comments/feed. Anyone know how I can fix?
Technical SEO | | DM50 -
301 redirect blog posts from old URL to new one
I moved a wordpress blog from domain.com to domain.com/blog . I want to redirect the links in google from the old domain.com to the new one, but I also want to put a new site/application at domain.com..so I'm thinking an .htaccess 301 redirect at the root wouldn't work. Any tips?
Technical SEO | | callmeed0 -
Getting Rid of Duplicate Page Titles After URL Structure Change
I've had all sorts of issues with google when they just dropped us on our head a few weeks ago. Google is crawling again after I made some changes, but they're still not ranking our content like they were so I have a few questions. I changed our url structure from /year/month/date/post-title to just /post-title and 301 redirected the old link structure to the new. When I look I see over 3000 duplicate title errors listing both versions of the url. 1. How do I get google to crawl the old url structure and recognize the 301 redirect and update the index? 2. Google is crawling the site again, but they're not ranking us like they were before. We're in a highly competitive category and I'm aware of that, but we've always been an authority in our niche. We have plenty of quality backlinks and often we're originators of the content which is then rewritten by a trillion websites everywhere. We're not the best at writing and titles, but we're working on it and this did not matter much to google previously as it was ranking us pretty highly on the front page and certainly ranking us over many sites that are ranking above us today. Some backlinks http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/dajaz1.com A few examples - if you google twista gucci louis prada you'll see many of the sites who trackbacked to us since we premiered the song rank much higher than us. 3 weeks ago we were ranking above them. http://dajaz1.com/twista-gucci-louis-prada/ google search jadakiss consignment mixtape 3 weeks ago we were ranking higher than all 4 sites ranking above us. The sites ranking above us even link to us or mention us, yet they rank above us now. original content here http://dajaz1.com/watch-jadakiss-confirms-cosignment-mixtape-2012-schedule/ I could throw out a ton of examples like this. How do we get google to rank us again. It should be noted that I'm not using any SEO plugin's on the site. I hand coded what's in there, and I know I can probably do it better so any tips or ideas is welcome. I'm pretty sure that our issues were caused by the Yoast SEO Plugin as when I search site:dajaz1.com the pages and topics that display were all indexed while the plugin was active. I've since removed it and all calls to it in the database, but I'm pretty nervous about plugins right now. Which brings me to my third and final question How do I get rid of the page category and topic pages that were indexed and seem to be ranking higher than the rest of our content? I lied one more. For category url I've set it to remove the category base so the url is dajaz1.com/news or dajaz1.com/music is that preferable or is this causing me issues? Any feedback is appreciated. Also google is crawling again (see attached image) but the Kilobytes downloaded per day hasn't. Should I be concerned about this? Gd9i6
Technical SEO | | malady0 -
Hyphenated Domain Names - "Spammy" or Not?
Some say hyphenated domain names are "spammy". I have also noticed that Moz's On Page Keyword Tool does NOT recognize keywords in a non-hyphenated domain name. So one would assume neither do the bots. I noticed obviously misleading words like car in carnival or spa in space or spatula, etc embedded in domain names and pondered the effect. I took it a step further with non-hyphenated domain names. I experimented by selecting totally random three or four letter blocks - Example: randomfactgenerator.net - rand omf act gene rator Each one of those clips returns copious results AND the On-Page Report Card does not credit the domain name as containing "random facts" as keywords**,** whereas www.business-sales-sarasota.com does get credit for "business sales sarasota" in the URL. This seems an obvious situation - unhyphenated domains can scramble the keywords and confuse the bots, as they search all possible combinations. YES - I know the content should carry it but - I do not believe domain names are irrelevant, as many say. I don't believe that hyphenated domain names are not more efficient than non hyphenated ones - as long as you don't overdo it. I have also seen where a weak site in an easy market will quickly top the list because the hyphenated domain name matches the search term - I have done it (in my pre Seo Moz days) with ft-myers-auto-air.com. I built the site in a couple of days and in a couple weeks it was on page one. Any thoughts on this?
Technical SEO | | dcmike0 -
Follow up from http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/52837/google-analytics
Ben, I have a follow up question from our previous discussion at http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/52837/google-analytics To summarize, to implement what we need, we need to do three things: add GA code to the Darden page _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.darden.virginia.edu']);_gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]);_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); Change links on the Darden Page to look like http://www.darden.virginia.edu/web/MBA-for-Executives/ and [https://darden-admissions.symplicity.com/applicant](<a href=)">Apply Now and make into [https://darden-admissions.symplicity.com/applicant](<a href=)" > onclick="_gaq.push(['_link', 'https://darden-admissions.symplicity.com/applicant']); return false;">Apply Now Have symplicity add this code. _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.symplicity.com']);_gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]);_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); Due to our CMS system, it does not allow the user to add onClick to the link. So, we CANNOT add part 2) What will be the result if we have only 1) and 3) implemented? Will the data still be fed to GA account 'UA-12345-1'? If not, how can we get cross domain tracking if we cannot change the link code? Nick
Technical SEO | | Darden0