Just saw a competitor jump in rank by double digits, questioning my url structure choice now.
-
Currently I have for our big keyword oursite.com/big-keyword/ and clicking on a material type will be
oursite.com/big-keyword/material-type/
Our competition has **theirsite.com/big-keyword/ **and when you click on their material type
**theirsite.com/material-type-big-keyword/ **
The also have 20 some pages, while we have around 652 as a eCommerce site as well, not sure why they jumped so high in rankings, while their backlink structure is so small still and they have a DA half of ours.
I'm in the middle of a site redesign and very close to restructuring the urls the way they have it, since it really seems to have worked well.
How do you feel about that?
-
Yes I have run a full report, but thank you very much for the resource, I'm sure others will find it very helpful.
From the report I've seen that our backlink profile seems to be our biggest issue of ranking, especially since we lost one of our biggest. And for a niche industry eCommerce site, it's very difficult to find backlink opportunities.
Hoping that after this site redesign we will of increased out DA and PA some, but won't see that change for a few more months at best.
Again thank you for the resource and response everyone!
-
Personally, I'd hesitate before attributing their jump to your URLs. Have you ever run a Full SERP Report on your keywords in the (Moz) Keyword Difficulty Tool? It might give you a sense of what you'll need to do to boost your rankings. There's a video on how it works here: https://moz.com/academy/competition-keyword-analysis
-
I do understand that it's not a good recommendation, however, our site hasn't been ranking better than 15 to 20 for longtails and for the major keyword, we rank 45 to 60 often, the biggest thing I see missing, is the keyword in the url structure, this keyword is basically our whole business. So seeing that this new site pops up, with 47 pages, ranked poorly for these keywords before and jumped from last place to 4 pages ahead of us in such a short period of time, with a DA of 9 and 10 less backlinks than us, and they have the keyword we want to rank for in all urls that matter, really makes you wonder, if all the standards being followed are really what works.
We also have a bigger social media following / engagement than our competition, and I've seen that really have no affect on rankings so far.
-
I concur with Logan - it is a risky business.
There is lots to review, so I am only making one suggestion which is contemporary to what i am seeing now. I would look more at how they are driving traffic. Is it referral traffic from facebook, etc. Several of my clients have had big jumps in the last month if they have strong referral traffic from high domain locations. I have seen no data on it, just a personal observation at this stage...
-
It's not recommended to change URLs for the sake of rankings. Check out this article for a comment straight from Google on this topic: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-urls-seo-17889.html.
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
-
Google selecting incorrect URL as canonical: 'Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical'
Hi there, A number of our URLs are being de-indexed by Google. When looking into this using Google Search Console the same message is appearing on multiple pages across our sites: 'Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical' 'IndexingIndexing allowed? YesUser-declared canonical - https://www.mrisoftware.com/ie/products/real-estate-financial-software/Google-selected canonical - https://www.mrisoftware.com/uk/products/real-estate-financial-software/'Has anyone else experienced this problem?How can I get Google to select the correct, user-declared canoncial? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nfrank0 -
URL Parameters
On our webshop we've added some URL-parameters. We've set URL's like min_price, filter_cat, filter_color etc. on "don't Crawl" in our Google Search console. We see that some parameters have 100.000+ URL's and some have 10.000+ Is it better to add these parameters in the robots.txt file? And if that's better, how can we write it down so the URL's will not be crawled. Our robotos.txt files shows now: # Added by SEO Ultimate's Link Mask Generator module User-agent: * Disallow: /go/ # End Link Mask Generator output User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
Which URL would you choose?
1 – www.company.com/subfolder/subfolder/keyword-keyword-product (I’m able to keyword match with this url) or 2. www.company.com/subfolder/subfolder/product (no url keyword match) What would you choose? A url which is "short" but still relevant, or, a url which is more descriptive allowing “keyword” match? Be great to get your feedback guys. Many thanks Gary
Technical SEO | | GaryVictory0 -
URL Structure for Product Pages
Hi Moz Community. I'm in need of some URL structure advice for product pages. We currently have ~4,000+ products and I'm trying to determine whether I need a new URL structure from the previous site owners. There are two current product URL structures that exist in our website: 1.http://www.example.com/bracelets/gold-bracelets/1-1-10-ct-diamond-tw-slip-on-bangle-14k-pink-gold-gh-i1-i2/ (old URL structure)
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
2. http://www.example.com/gemstone-bracelet-prd-bcy-121189/ (new URL structure) The problem is that half of our products are still in the old structure (no one moved them forward), but at the same time I'm not sure if the new structure is optimized as much as possible. Every single gemstone bracelet, or whatever product will have the same url structure, only being unique with the product number at the end. Would it be better to change everything over to more product specific URLS. I.e. example.com/topaz-gemstone-dangle-bracelet. Thanks for your help!
-Reed0 -
Structure of urls
**Hallo from Athens, Greece. We have to implement the following project and i need your help: ** We will build a company guide for the whole country and company local guides for each city for the same client. **Information of the country guide is the sum of information of local guides, so when a user is at the country guide he sees information from companies from all cities and when the user is at city guide he sees info only for the city. ** The problem is the structure of the url we should have. Should the page of presentation of each company should have structure as domain.gr/id/company? or city.domain.gr/id/company and the one to be canonical to the other? is this good for seo? Should both urls be included in the sitemap? Thank you
Technical SEO | | herculesopa0 -
Header Tag Question
While reviewing code on a site, I found the following: <h1 class="<a class="attribute-value">logo</a>"> <a id="<a class="attribute-value">logo</a>" href="[http://siteexampleh1.com](view-source:http://dmbinc.com/)"><span>Example of most important content on this page- Companyspan>a> h1> Is this the correct way to place code for an h1 tag? The content is cached within the page and is hidden to the viewer. The content that is assigned as the h1, is a logo. Majority of code I have been reviewing does not use this setup. The code would instead read as ( This is heading 1 ). Can anyone provide insights on this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jfeitlinger0 -
Title Tags & Url Structure
So I'm working on a website for a client in the Tourism Industry. We've got a comprehensive list of museums & other attractions in a number of cities that have to go online. And we have to come up with the correct url structure, title tags and obviously content. My current line of thought was to work the urls in the following way. http://domain.com/type-of-attraction/city/name-of-attraction/ This is mainly because we think that the type of attraction is far more important then the city (SEO wise) as the country as a whole receives more searches, however we require a city in the url to make it unique because some attractions across cities happen to share names and we don't want to have the names of attractions littered with city names. However for title-tags I wanted to go the other way around, again due to the attraction type being more important then the city. Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction - City - Brand Name or Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction in City - Brand Name I am quite confident in working it this way; however I would appreciate if I receive some feedback on this structure, you think its good or you would make any suggestions / alterations. One last thing, There's the possibility of having many urls ending up with the same city names (For each type of attraction) I would think that just providing a list of links & duplicate text is not enough; would you suggest a canonical pointing to a link containing just information on the city? and using the other pages for user-navigation only? or should i set variables in the text which are replaced by the types of attraction so that the text looks different for each one?
Technical SEO | | jonmifsud0 -
Sitemap question
My sitemap includes www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html, they are both the same page, will this have any negative effects, or can I remove the www.example.com/index.html?
Technical SEO | | Aftermath_SEO0