Placement of key words in URL
-
I notice that the MOZ Page Grader considers "/keyword1/keyword2-keyword3" in a URL string to be less effective than "/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3". Is this correct from Google's perspective?
If I am trying to maximise my SEO for the page title "Business building tips", for example, does Google think my URL is more relevant if it's in the form:
1. www.website.com/business-building-tips
2. www.website.com/business/building-tips or
3. www.website.com/business/business-building-tipsMy instinct tells me 3 is more powerful, but logic tells me if I have a whole section devoted to "business" and one of those pages is "business building tips" then 2 should work just as well, possibly better?
-
Maybe the real question is why On-Page Grader is so limited in its ability to assess URLs, page titles, etc. I don't believe the tool behaves at all like Google in its assessment of content, so I wonder about using it at all. What do others use?
-
URL best practices aside, know that the On-Page Grader only recognizes a tracked keyword when it appears exactly as it was entered into your Moz campaign. It's not actually any sort of commentary on what Google considers more effective from a URL structure standpoint.
Personally, I would also choose variant 2.
-
I would chose variant 2. Less for an omnious Ranking Boost and more for segmentation of the site. With a subdirectory like /business/ you can analyse the behaviour in that content/business section much better than if you just put everything in a "no-subdirectory url".
No subdirectories are, imo, only useful if you have no clear sections or topics - or a single one defined by the domain.
As Marcus Miller mentioned, this has the added benefit of making sense in a vacuum. At least in my opinion.
Nico
-
Marcus has given you some good pointers there and while there does appear to be a small benefit in putting your keywords into a URL, it isn't something I would change just to do so.
In terms of how should a URL look, it depends on what makes the most sense for the products / pages. If you have a shop, then you might want to break it down to categories and products - if not, then a flat structure will probably work better.
Keep is straightforward, informative but never stuff it for the sake of trying. Shorter URL's are better where you can, but don't aim for a short one if it misses the point.
-Andy
-
Totally agree witb Marcus, since I also believe that is still a ranking factor, maybe even higher than the 1% mentioned above, especially for low ranking keywords!
The 1st structure would be my way of doing things and this is how I teach other to do, rather than using subfolders.
But is also good to remember the user (who may prefer shorter URL since a study showed he may feel safer). I like in this cases to use the phrase Matt Cutts said few years back: "More is not better any more"
-
Hey
I believe Matt Cutts once said that keywords in a URL help a "little bit" (1). That was like back in 2009 though so whether that is still a direct factor in the algorithm who knows. If so it would only be a 1% thing.
Looking at your three options I would be staggered if there was any ranking difference between the three of them. Personally I like #1 best if you have no specific business section on the site and #2 if you do have a business section with other articles on the site. #3 looks a bit spammy and over long (for SEO's sake only).
Ultimately though this is the wrong way to look at things - you need to look at things the way Google wants us to look at things and do what is best for your user. You want a URL that clearly indicates what the page is about and that would look good pasted into a blog post or forum or some such. You want a URL that looks the part in
You then want to make sure that everything else is helping clearly illustrate what this page is about:
- URL (our entry point)
- Page Title
- Internal Navigation / Anchors
- Breadcrumb if used
- H1 tags
- Page content
- Domain level keyword content
- External links if relevant / possible / quality etc
This is just such a tiny thing overall that I really would not sweat it - do what is right for your users and what makes most sense and the SEO aspects will take care of themselves.
Hope that helps
MarcusReferences
1. http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-keywords-in-the-url-16976
-
What prompted my question is that sometimes the MOZ page grader discounts our URL for not having keywords in it even though the keywords are one step back in the path (as in example 2 above).
-
Hi Tony,
First of all keyword in URL doesn't helps in ranking boost so don't worry about that . I would suggest you to go with first option.
Thanks
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
-
Remove all stop words from permalink?
I saw many websites theses days remove stop words from the URL, How important is to remove stop words from the URL?
On-Page Optimization | | varunrupal0 -
Will changing a URL negatively affect ranking?
Hello Mozzers, We would like to change the URL for a page on our website which ranks well for some our keyphrases/words. We are hoping the change of URL, through the addition of an additional keyword would help boost the rank of that URL further. At the moment out page gets 2 x A and 2 x B 1xF on the MOZ page rank tool using 5 keyphrase/word variations . One phrase ranks 4, one ranks 3 and the other 3 are 'not in the top 50' Our plan was to change the URL, using SHF404, and use 'Fetch' in the Google search console to re-submit the page to Google. Appreciate you can't give any guarantees how Google will behave, just wondered what your thoughts were on the wisdom of changing the URL in the first place? Thanks Ian
On-Page Optimization | | Substance-create0 -
Duplicate content issues - page content and store URLs
Hi, I'm experiencing some heavy duplicate content Crawl errors on Moz with www.redrockdecals.com and therefore I really need some help. It brings up different connections between products and I'm having a hard time figuring out what it means. It is listing the same products as duplicate content but they have different URL endings. For example:http://www.redrockdecals.com/car-graphics/chevrolet-silverado?___store=nl&___from_store=us
On-Page Optimization | | speedbird1229
&
http://www.redrockdecals.com/car-graphics/chevrolet-silverado?___store=d&___from_store=us It seems like Moz considers the copy-pasted parts in the Full Description (scrolled a bit down on product pages) as Duplicate Content. For example the general text found on this page: http://www.redrockdecals.com/caution-tow-limited-turning-radius-decal Or this page: http://www.redrockdecals.com/if-you-don-t-succeed-first-time-then-skydiving-isn-t-for-you-bumper-sticker I am planning to write new and unique descriptions for all products but what do you suggest - should I either remove the long same descriptions or just shorten them perhaps so they don't outweigh the short but unique descriptions above? I've heard search engines understand that some parts of the page can be same on other pages but I wonder if in my case this has gone too deep... Thanks so much!0 -
How to fix this URL?
Moz crawl test only show one URL indexed for the website - http://ravisharrma.com/ Site:http://ravisharrma.com/ shows 3 URLs and how to fix URLs for the website?
On-Page Optimization | | Dan_Brown10 -
Why is my key word rank so horrible?
I've been with seomoz for a couple of months now. I've been working hard trying to rank for the key word "kayak fishing" on my site yakangler.com. My onpage report for my home page is an A, my moztrust rank is higher than my competitors. I don't have the most links but I don't have the fewest either. Why am I ranking so horribly. Last I checked I wasn't on the first 50 pages for Google search. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | mr_w0 -
Does having a "+" in a URL hurt SEO? Would much value be gained changing it to a hyphen?
There's a site that contains "+" signs in the URL in order to call different information for the content on the page. Would it be better to change those to hyphens (-), or not that much value will be gained, so leave them as is? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MitchellStoker0 -
Keyword placement on home page or throughout the website
OK, I find the courage to ask this because there is not supposed to be a dumb question. Like all of us, I want my website to rank great with a particular keyword. Do I have to use this keyword only on my home page (the start page which I want to appear on top Google results), or does it make a difference if I use the keyword on several articles that I post on my website. These articles all have seperate links. Eg i want the www.website.com to be found by Google, but this website contains www.website.com/link1.html, www.website.com/link2.html.. etc. Will keyword usage on link1.html, link2.html etc be relevant so that www.website.com is found by Google? Or is every single page for itself? Hope I have explained that well and I would really appreciate your feedback.
On-Page Optimization | | polyniki0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0