Directory Structuring - Im so confused what to do...
-
So there's no way I could type out my thoughts / questions. If you're bored, have a cup of coffee and some oreos, and are interested in a strange situation that I can't figure out the solution to, I'd appreciate your input:
I should note ahead of time: It really is important to me to do things "by the book" and "to the letter" with SEO. So while there may be some gray areas, I would like to really do the one thing that is BEST in this situation. Thanks for any input.
-
I wouldn't go beyond 2 levels deep on any sub-directory except on rare occasions when it's still a short URL. The directory structure does not matter so much for SEO if done correctly. However, with WordPress, the breadcrumbs, navigation and site-wide links will end up with poorly prioritized interlinking. This could be bad if you do have important pages in sub-directory structures such as yourself.
For example, your 1st level directory pages such as /guides/, /treatments/ and /social/ are cannibalizing page authority simply because they are linked to more (and in better positions) than your Men's Guide page is linked to. I recommend beefing up the internal links to the Men's Guide page and improving a lengthening the content on that page as you mentioned you plan to do.
Instead of linking to the page with the anchor "Introduction" use "Men's Hair Loss Guide."
It's a good idea to keep URLs as short as possible so that your keywords have the opportunity to appear in bold in the URL of a search listing. This makes the listing more attractive.
You may also want to consider placing the Men's and Women's Guide at the top level of your menu instead of the sub-menu if possible.
I've also noticed you have a lot of old content being indexed with a different website design, such as the About Us page. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but I would suggest migrating it to the new design or redirecting where appropriate.
I hope these suggestions are of some use. Feel free to get in touch if you would like to discuss this or more advanced SEO further.
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
-
Ruby on rails sitemap.xml structure
Is their a recommended way/best practice to implement sitemap.xml files on a site built with ruby on rails?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
URL Structure For E-commerce Sites
Hi Guys, I was wondering what would be the optimal and best URL structure for sub-categories on a E-commerce site for SEO purposes. Example if my category was dresses and I had multiple sub-categories within dresses would 1 or 2 below be the better URL structure? 1) Domain + Category + Sub-Category be the most suitable URL structure: Sleeveless Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/dresses/sleeveless-dresses Midi Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/dresses/midi-dresses 2) OR would excluding the category be better Domain + Sub-Category like: Sleeveless Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/sleeveless-dresses Midi Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/midi-dresses Do you think it makes much of a difference, is shorter better and more effective in this case? E.g. Rand discuses in this article: https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls that having the keyword in the URL serves as anchor text, so wouldn't having additional keywords dilute value in this case? Plus he mentions shorter URLs the better. Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright1 -
Best practices for structuring an ecommerce site
I'm revamping my wife's ecommerce site. It is currently a very low traffic website that is not indexed very well in Google. So, my plan is to restructure it based upon the best practices that helps me avoid duplicate content penalties, and easier to index strategies. The store has about 7 types of products. Each product has approximately 30 different size variations that are sometimes specifically searched for. For example: 20x10x1 air filters, 20x10x2 air filters, 20x10x1 allergy reducing air filters, etc So, is it best for me to create 7 different products with 30 different size variations (size selector at the product level that changes the price) or is it better to create 210 different product pages, one for each style/size?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pherbio0 -
How to structure links on a "Card" for maximum crawler-friendliness
My question is how to best structure the links on a "Card" while maintaining usability for touchscreens. I've attached a simple wireframe, but the "card" is a format you see a lot now on the web: it's about a "topic" and contains an image for the topic and some text. When you click the card it links to a page about the "topic". My question is how to best structure the card's html so google can most easily read it. I have two options: a) Make the elements of the card 2 separate links, one for the image and one for the text. Google would read this as follows. //image
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich
[](/target URL) //text
<a href=' target="" url'="">Topic</a href='> b) Make the entire "Card" a link which would cause Google to read it as follows: <a></a> <a>Bunch of div elements that includes anchor text and alt-image attributes above along with a fair amount of additional text.</a> <a></a> Holding UX aside, which of these options is better purely from a Google crawling perspective? Does doing (b) confuse the bot about what the target page is about? If one is clearly better, is it a dramatic difference? Thanks! PwcPRZK0 -
Question about best approach to site structure
I am curious if anyone can share some advice. I am working on planning architecture for a tour company. The key piece of the content strategy will be providing details on each of the tour destinations, with associated profiles for each city within those destinations. Lots of content, which should be great for the SEO strategy. With regards to the architecture, I have a ‘destinations’ section on the Website where users can access each of the key destinations served by the tour company. My question is – from a planning perspective I can organize my folder structure in a few different ways. http://www.companyurl.com/destinations/touring-regions/cities/ or http://www.companyurl.com/destinations/ http://www.companyurl.com/touring-regionA/ http://www.companyurl.com/touring-regionB/cities-profile/ I am curious if anyone has an opinion on what might perform best in terms of the site structure from an SEO perspective. My fear is taking all of this rich content and placing it so many tiers down in the architecture of the site. Any advice that could be offered would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Google's Structured Data Testing Tool? No Data
I'm stumped as to why some of the pages on my website return no data from Google's Structured Data Testing Tool while other pages work fine and return the appropriate data. My home page http://www.parkseo.net returns no data while many inner pages do. http://www.parkseo.net Returns No Data http://www.parkseo.net/citation-submission.html Does Return Data. I have racked my brains out trying to figure out why some pages return data and others don't. Any help on this issue would be greatly appricated. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YMD
Gary Downey0 -
Product URL structure for a marketplace model
Hello All. I run an online marketplace start-up that has around 10000 products listed from around 1000+ sellers. We are a similar model to etsy/ebay in the sense that we provide a platform but sellers to list products and sell them. I have a URL structure question. I have read http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-define-best-url-structure-for-product-pages which seems to show everyone suggests to use Products: products/category/product-name Categories: products/category as the structure for product pages. Because we are a marketplace (our category structure has multiple tiers sometimes up to 3) our sellers choose a category for products to go in. How we have handled this before is we have used: Products: products/last-tier-category-chosen/product-name (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks/fluffy-marshmallows) Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks) However we have two issues with this: The categories can sometimes change, or users can change them which means the links completely change and undo any link building work built up. The urls can get a bit long and am worried that the most important data (the fluffy marshmallow that reflects in the page title and content) is left till too late in the URL. As a result we plan to change our URL structure (we are going through a rebuild anyhow so losing old links is not an issue here) so that the new structure was: Products: products/product-name(eg: /products/fluffy-marshmallows) Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks) My concern about doing this however, and question here, is whether this willnegatively impact the "structure" of pages when google crawls our marketplace.Because "fluffy marshmallows" will no longer technically fit into the url structure of "sweets and snacks". I dont know if this would have a negative impact or not. FYI etsy (one of the largest marketplace models in the world) us the latter approach and do not have categories in product urls, eg: listing/42003836/vintage-french-industrial-inspired-side Any ideas on this? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamPatterson0 -
Best website structure for product benefits and features.
I'm in disagreement with my partner over how best to represent our products' benefits and features on the homepage of our website. I'm interested in this from primarily a SEO perspective but it obviously has an impact on conversions as well. I believe that a homepage shouldn't contain too much information so as not to overwhelm the user, a brief sentence or two about each benefit with a link to another page with in depth info about the related feature. Each of these inner pages would be optimized and contain much more content that you could put on the homepage example below. Each Please see wireframe A He believes in more information on the homepage. There is more content to index which he believes is important for the homepage. Also, by using tabs most of the content is hidden from initial view so its doesn't clutter the page and the user doesn't have to leave the page to decide whether he is interested in the software. Please see wireframe B below. I'd really love to hear from other Moz'ers which they would choose and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Riona0
