Restructuring URLS - unsure if this falls on the spammy side of paths.
-
Hi all,
I'm restructuring a site that has been built with no real structure. It's moving over to HTTPS and having a full new development so it's a good time to tackle it all together.
It's a snowboard site and at the moment the courses, camps ect are all just as pages like:
examplesnowboarding.com/off-piste-backcountry/
I'm wanting to tighten the structure so it gives more meaning to the pages and so I can style them selectively and make it easier for the client to manage but I'm worried repeating the word snowboard too often will look spammy.
I'm wanting to do the following:
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/snowboard-courses/splitboard-backcountry-intro/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/snowboard-camps/technical-performance/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/snowboard-camps/girls-only/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/snowboard-lessons/private/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/snowboard-lessons/group/The urls are clean and humanly descriptive but it does mean that the "snowboard" keyword is used a lot!
The other 2 options I thought of were like so (including snowboard in the page name not path)
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/courses/snowboard-splitboard-backcountry-intro/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/snowboard-technical-performance/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/snowboard-girls-only/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/private-snowboard/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/group-snowboard/or simply removing "snowboard" as "snowboarding" is already in the main url
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/courses/splitboard-backcountry-intro/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/technical-performance/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/girls-only/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/private/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/group/Any thoughts appreciated!
-
Which idea did you decide against please? Surely having more paths would work better for breadcrumbs would it not?
Are you saying you think /courses/girls-only looks more spammy than /girls-only-course/ ?
Thank you
-
Hi,
Our company faced the same challenge and we decided against your idea. First of all, your urls will be extremely long and they will look spammy indeed. Imagine someone will search for your product and you rank well, but people might not want to visit due to the spammy looking URL. If the website is nicely structured, Google will understand what's going on. If there are a few urls that require the same name/keyword, try to differentiate. Regarding users' orientation on the site - why not use breadcrumbs? It makes a lot more sense than relying on online visitors having to check the lengthy urls.
Thanks
Katarina
-
That was the idea really as there are around 20 or so courses. 5-10 camps ect... so a decent amount to gain benefit from the structure.
I don't think there is any risk to forgetting to add -courses to a page however and I'm wondering if I'd be poking the bear too much by changing all the urls fairly drastically if they dont need to so much.
I can still setup the content in courses, camps ect from the cms admin so it's easy for them to manage without a path/ impact.
But yes each section like that will and does have a landing page already pretty much its just in a page name not a clear structure.
So it sounds like adding the extra structure is probably fairly sensible... but maybe more risky than keeping the current structure?
-
I'd say it depends if you're going to have a significant numbers of courses, camps or lessons and a main landing page for them at examplesnowboarding.com/courses for example.
As a general rule, it's probably a good idea to have courses,camps and lessons in the urls just to give an extra indication to Google, and also to users. And saves those times when you forget to include 'course' on the end of every page title, too...
-
No paths just /name-of-course-or-camp/ at present
-
What is the current structure?
-
Thanks,
I'm not sure I need to do the full structure now - I thought having paths maybe more of an indicator to the content type but maybe it'll be better to manage these like so:
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/splitboard-backcountry-intro-course/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/technical-performance-camp/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/girls-only-camp/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/private-lessons/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/group-lessons/vs
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/courses/splitboard-backcountry-intro/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/technical-performance/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/girls-only/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/private/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/group/Does anyone have a preference over which is better on a site with say 70 pages and a 300 post blog?
-
Hey there,
I'd recommend going with the last option.
Google will understand from the existing content what is your site about. You don't need to include the word "snowboard" in every URL. If you do so, it may hurt your site instead for trying to "fool" the search engines. On top of that, KWs in URLs are not a strong ranking signal anymore.
Also, the shorter link the better not only for Google but for the user experience as well.
Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin
-
Hi Snowflake74,
If your website is about snowboarding then there are going to be multiple URLs that have the word snowboard in them outside the domain name. Your first example is perfectly acceptable. You should be designing your url structure for the best user experience not to manipulate Google or any other search engine. Do keywords in urls help. Yes they certainly do but are not as big of a ranking factor as your on page content.
I would stay away from blatantly stuffing your pages with the work Snowboard or versions there of. This is where spammy keyword selection can kill you. Not so much on the URLs. You do however, want to make sure your urls are short. The only problem I can see with your new structures is that the urls have a chance to be way to long.
Thanks,
Don
-
I should mentioned I've read up on keyword stemming so my gut feeling is that because "snowboarding" is in the domain name that I shouldn't have to repeat "snowboard" further down the url as it should be matched from the top level keyword "snowboarding"?
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
-
Duplicate content warning: Same page but different urls???
Hi guys i have a friend of mine who has a site i noticed once tested with moz that there are 80 duplicate content warnings, for instance Page 1 is http://yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html the warning page is http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html another example Page 1 http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/ same second page http://yourdigitalfile.com i noticed that the whole website is like the nealry every page has another version in a different url?, any ideas why they dev would do this, also the pages that have received the warnings are not redirected to the newer pages you can go to either one??? thanks very much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ydf0 -
Site build in the 80% of canonical URLs - What is the impact on visibility?
Hey Everyone, I represent international wall decorations store where customer can freely choose a pattern to be printed on a given material among a few milions of patterns. Due to extreme large number of potential URL combinations we struggle with too many URL adressess for a months now (search console notifications). So we finally decided to reduce amount of products with canonical tag. Basing on users behavior, our business needs and monthly search volume data we selected 8 most representative out of 40 product categories and made them canonical toward the rest. For example: If we chose 'Canvas prints' as our main product category, then every 'Framed canvas' product URL points rel=canonical tag toward its equivalent URL within 'Canvas prints' category. We applied the same logic to other categories (so "Vinyl wall mural - Wild horses running" URL points rel=canonical tag to "Wall mural - Wild horses running" URL, etc). In terms of Googlebot interpretation, there are really tiny differences between those Product URLs, so merging them with rel=canonical seems like a valid use. But we need to keep those canonicalised URLs for users needs, so we can`t remove them from a store as well as noindex does not seem like an good option. However we`re concerned about our SEO visibility - if we make those changes, our site will consist of ~80% canonical URLs (47,5/60 millions). Regarding your experience, do you have advices how should we handle that issue? Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _JediMindBender
JMB0 -
How Important is it to Use Keywords in the URL
I wanted to know how important this measure is on rankings. For example if I have pages named "chair.html" or "sofa.html" and I wanted to rank for the term seagrass chair or rattan sofa.. Should I start creating new pages with the targeted keywords "seagrass-chair.html" and just copy everything from the old page to the new and setup the 301 redirects?? Will this hurt my SEO rankings in the short term? I have over 40 pages I would have to rename and redirect if doing so would really help in the long run. Appreciate your input.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
Why isn't a 301 redirect removing old style URLs from Google's index?
I have two questions:1 - We changed the URL structure of our site. Old URLs were in the format of kiwiforsale.com/used_fruit/yummy_kiwi. These URLs are 301 redirected to kiwiforsale.com/used-fruit/yummy-kiwi. We are getting duplicate content errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Why isn't the 301 redirect removing the old style URL out of Google's index?2 - I tried to remove the old style URL at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals, however I got the message that "We think the image or web page you're trying to remove hasn't been removed by the site owner. Before Google can remove it from our search results, the site owner needs to take down or update the content."Why are we getting this message? Doesn't the 301 redirect alert Google that the old style URL is toast and it's gone?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL
I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
How long we can keep 302 redirection for a webpage url?
Hi Friends, I have a webpage featuring a product. I have created a new domain featuring the same product and the page is under construction. I am planning to do 302 redirection from the new domain to the existing domain for the time being. How long can I keep the 302 redirection from the new domain to existing domain? Is there any fixed time period/ duration that we can keep the 302 redirection for a webpage? I am planning to make few more pages (privacy policy, about us, etc) from the new domain 302 redirected to the existing domain. Is it possible? If so, how long can I keep the same? May I know which redirect is safe to use in this case, 302 or 301 redirect?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zco_seo0 -
URL Structure - forward slashes, hyphen separated, query paramters
I am having difficulty evaluating pros and cons of various URL structures with respect to SEO benefits. So I can have the following 1. /for-sale-in-<city>-<someothertext>-<uniqueid>.php
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | proptiger
So in this case a term like 'for sale in San Francisco' is directly part of the URL. </uniqueid></someothertext></city> 2. /for-sale/<city>/<someothertext>uniqueId
Here 'for sale in San Francisco' is not so direct in the URL, so I think. Also I 'heard' that forward slash URLs are somehow considered as being 'lower down' in the directory structure. </someothertext></city> 3. /for-sale/<city>/<someothertext>/?pid=uniqueId</someothertext></city> someOtherText contains keywords we are targeting. 1. Is there a preference of one format over the other? 2. Does it even matter? 3. someOtherText - does it makes sense to put keywords in the URL for just SEO purposes? I do not per se need someOtherText for functionality.0 -
Dramatic fall in SERP's for all keywords at end of March 2012?? Help!
Hi, Our website www.photoworld.co.uk has been improving it's SERP's for the last 12 months or so, achieving page 1 rankings for most of our key terms. Then suddenly, around the end of March, we suffered massive drops in nearly all of our key terms (see attached image for more info). Basically I wondered if anyone had any clues on what Google has suddenly taken a huge dislike to with our site and steps we can put in place to aid with rankings recovery ASAP. Thanks n8taO.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cewe0