URL Construction
-
Working on an old site that currently has category urls (that productively rank) like this example:
LakeNameBoating.com/category/705687/rentals
I want to enhance the existing mid page one rank for terms related to "Lake Name Boat Rentals," 301ing the old urls to the new, would you construct the new urls as:
LakeNameBoating.com/lake-name-boat-rentals
or...
LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals
And why? It's all for one particular lake with "name" being just an anonymous placeholder example.
Thanks!
-
Awesome! Glad to hear it!
-
Here's an update. Went with LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals. It all worked out great. Thank you all for the help.
-
In our experience the keywords in the URL do play (but pales in comparison to other on page signals). If you have multiple iterations of these sites, why not do some A/B testings to see what woks best.
Acknowledging what the previous posters are saying but if you are going to leverage this, do a little key word research and find out what the predicted searches look like. We do find that order can make a difference, i.e. Lake Tahoe Boat Rental vs Boat Rental Lake Tahoe. Maybe play with the inverted order of the title tags as a contrast.
Again, other signals are much more important but all things being equal we have seen positive movements with keywords in the URL.
-
Fair enough! You're definitely not wrong—the structure you're proposing is absolutely better than the one you're currently using. Whether it's worth it to change things now is up to you. As long as you're aware of the risk and you're confident that it's worth it, I say go for it.
-
Okay, well, thanks guys. I kind of thought you'd feel a little stronger about the value of changing urls. Especially since Moz has tools that grade lower for janky urls. My own experience is a messed-up url is not a positive and well worth the slight/temporary decrease in page authority while that gets sorted out.
Anyhoo, thanks again!
-
To be honest, I tend to agree with Logan when it comes to changing URLs. That said, if you're fairly sure that simplifying your URLs would help, I'd go with the second option.
-
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the message.
Would you go with new urls when the old urls are so bad...
-
If you're sure you want to use a new URL, I'd go with the second one (LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals). The name of the lake being in the domain would make using it again feel redundant.
That's pretty much just personal preference, though.
-
Hi Logan,
Thanks for the response. I don't know, I've had a lot of success cleaning up non-search friendly urls like this.
In regards to the link above, Google saying "don't bother" may not be the whole story. But thank you for your take on it.
Finally, a cleaner/more purposeful url would have better CTR.
Anyone else?
-
Hi,
I never recommend URL changes for the purpose of improving rankings. While URL structure is a ranking factor, it's not a big enough one to justify restructuring your URLs for. See this article for more on how insignificant this is as a ranking signal.
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
-
Changing Url Removes Backlink
Hello MOZ Community, I have question regarding Bad Backlink Removal. My Site's Post's Image got 4 to 5k backlinks from unknown sites and also their is no contact details on their site so that i can contact them to remove. So, I have an idea for which i want suggestion " If I change the url that receieves backlinks" does this will remove backlinks? For Example: https://example.com/test/ got 5k backlinks if I change this url to https://examplee.com/test-failed/ does this will remove those 5k backlinks? If not then How Can I remove those Backlinks? I Know about disavow but this takes time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jackson210 -
URL structure - which one is better?
We are creating a new website and got stuck while deciding the URL structure. Our concern is which url is better in terms of SEO i.e. pune.fabogo.com/spa or fabogo.com/pune/spa and why. Also which one would rank faster if someone searches for **spas in pune if both **pages are same.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabogo_marketing0 -
URL structure for SEO
Hi Mozzers, I have a site which is a combination of product pages, and news and advice pages that relate to the products. How would you approach the URL structure for this, following SEO best practice? Approach 1 Product pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q
www.website.com/product-category/product-page News and advice pages:
www.website.com/product-category/product-page/news-and-advice-story-1
www.website.com/product-category/product-page/news-and-advice-story-2
etc or Approach 2 Product pages:
www.website.com/product-category/product-page News and advice pages:
www.website.com/news/product-category/news-and advice-story-1 (with internal linking to relevant product page)
www.website.com/news/product-category/news-and advice-story-2 (with internal linking to relevant product page)
etc Or would a different approach be better?0 -
Is there a problems with putting encoding into the subdomain of a URL?
We are looking at changing our URL structure for tracking various affiliates from: https://sub.domain.com/quote/?affiliate_id=xxx to https://aff_xxx_affname.domain.com/quote/ Both would allow us to track affiliates, but the second would allow us to use cookies to track. Does anyone know if this could possibly cause SEO concerns? Also, For the site we want to rank for, we will use a reverse proxy to change the URL from https://aff_xxx.maindomain.com/quote/ to https://www.maindomain.com/quote/ would that cause any SEO issues. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Woo Commerce Woo Compare Urls Indexing?
Hi I am using Wordpress/Woo commerce for my site Thetotspot.co.uk http://www.thetotspot.co.uk/?action=yith-woocompare-add-product&id=1412&_wpnonce=a5560b1b07 But I am getting a lot of temporary redirects registering in Moz for things like the above - woo compare / add to cart links Anyone come across this - how did you get solve? I am using Yoast SEO currently, have no indexed archives and pages of archive etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kelly33300 -
Expired urls
For a large jobs site, what would be the best way to handle job adverts that are no longer available? Ideas that I have include: Keep the url live with the original content and display current similar job vacancies below - this has the advantage of continually growing the number of indexed pages. 301 redirect old pages to parent categories - this has the advantage of concentrating any acquired link juice where it is most needed. Your thoughts much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg0 -
Penguin Penalty On A Duplicate url
Hi I have noticed a distinct drop in traffic to a page on my web site which occurred around April of last year. Doing some analysis of links pointing to this page, I found that most were sitewide and exact match commercial anchor text. I think the obvious conclusion from this is I got slapped by Penguin although I didn't receive a warning in Webmaster Tools. The page in question was ranking highly for our targeted terms and the url was structured like this: companyname.com/category/index.php The same page is still ranking for some of those terms, but it is the duplicate url: companyname.com/category/ The sitewide problem is associated with links going to the index.php page. There aren't too many links pointing to the non index.php page. My question is this - if we were to 301 redirect index.php to the non php page, would this be detrimental to the rankings we are getting today? ie would we simply redirect the penguin effect to the non php page? If anybody has come across a similar problem or has any advice, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sicseo0 -
Changing URL Structure
We are going to be relaunching our website with a new URL structure. My question is, how is it best to deal with the migration process in terms of old URLS appearing whilst we launch the new ones. How best should we launch the new structure, considering we've in the region of 10,000 pages currently indexed in Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeilTompkins0