SEO effect of URL with subfolder versus parameters?
-
I'll make this quick and simple. Let's say you have a business located in several cities. You've built individual pages for each city (linked to from a master list of your locations).
For SEO purposes is it better to have the URL be a subfolder, or a parameter off of the home page URL:
https://www.mysite.com/dallas which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/dallas/index.php
or
http://www.mysite.com/?city=dallas which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/index.php?city=dallas
-
Thanks Miriam, This is very helpful and makes a lot of sense. What do you think of towns and villages, or boroughs of a large city. Do you think the close proximity is dangerous territory re: keyword permutations?
I take your point about unique content tailored to the people of the city - it makes a lot of sense. But what about locations that are closer to each other?
I know it's a tricky question but any insight would be most welcome.
-
That's a good question, Andrew. It's true that it's no longer a best practice to build out a set of pages featuring slightly different permutations of a keyword (car repair, auto repair, repairing cars, fixing cars, etc.). That approach is now quite dated. Honestly, it never made any sense beyond the fact that when Google wasn't quite so sophisticated, you could trick your way into some additional rankings with this type of redundant content.
The development of location landing pages is different. These are of fundamental use to consumers, and the ideal is to create each city's landing page in a way that is uniquely helpful to a specific audience. So, for example, your store in Detroit is now having a special on winter clothing right now, because it's still snowing there. Meanwhile, your store in Palm Beach is already stocking swim trunks. For a large, multi-location Enterprise, location landing pages can feature highly differentiated content, including highlights of regional-appropriate inventory and specials, as well as unique NAP, driving directions, reviews from local customers, and so much more.
The key to avoiding the trap of simply publishing a large quantity of near-duplicate pages is to put in the effort to research the communities involved and customize these location pages to best fit local needs.
-
Hi Searchout,
Good for you for creating a unique page for each of your locations. I like to keep URLs as simple as possible, for users, so I'd go with:
etc.
From an SEO perspective, I don't think there's a big difference between root URLs and subfolders. If you're using one structure, I doubt you'd see any difference from doing it differently (unless you were using subdomains, which is a different conversation).
-
Of course that cities will be counted.
That´s why im always reinforcing the idea of creating UNIQUE and Special pages for each keyword.
Google is getting smarter and smarter, so simple variations in a few words are easly detected.Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR. -
Hi
Thanks for your response I'm interested in this too. I've been targeting cities with their own pages but I head recently that google are going to be clamping down on multiple keyword permutations. Do you think cities will be counted in this?
-
Hi there!
In my opinion, for SEO purposes it is correct to have a unique page (really different from other, not just changing the city name and location) por each big city you are optimizing.
Thus said, a subfolder is useful in order to show google the name of the city in the URL. It is common that google considers parameters different than folders.Also, remember to avoid duplicate content. /dallas/ and /dallas/index.php should not be accesible and indexable for google. Redirect one to the other or canonicalize one to the other. Same with www, non-www, http and https versions.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.
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
-
Reasonable to Ask URL of Link from SEO Providing New Links before Link Activation?
My firm has hired an SEO to create links to our site. We asked the SEO to provide a list of domains that they are targeting for potential links. The SEO did not agree to this request on the grounds that the list is their unique intellectual property. Alternatively I asked the SEO to provide the URL that will be linking to our site before the link is activated. The SEO did not agree to this. However, they did say we could provide comments afterwards so they could tweak their efforts when the next 4-5 links are obtained next month. The SEO is adamant that the links will not be spam. For whatever it is worth the SEO was highly recommended. I am an end user; the owner and operator of a commercial real estate site, not an SEO or marketing professional. Is this protectiveness over process and data typical of link building providers? I want to be fair with the provider and hope I will be working with them a long time, however I want to ensure I receive high quality links. Should I be concerned? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Subdomain or subfolder for each country
Hi all I have a great .com domain but the cctlds are not available so I plan on using the .com for all the countries and languages. What is the best approach for SEO: subdomains like wikipedia does (de.greatdomain.com) or subfolders (greatdomain.com/de)? I know this question comes up frequently on other websites but I would like to hear the Moz forum.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndersDK0 -
How to lay off your SEO compnay?
I have decided to replace my seo company. The pint is this company has been partly my developer too. So he has set up a demo server of my website. 1- Should I be worried about duplicate material when I end my cooperation with this company(The demo server) 2- Should I be worried that if they do not like it, they go and delete all the submitted materials and destroy my pages rankings? Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Ecommerce SEO URL Structure Questions
| I am in the process of developing a new Magento ecommerce store. Take for instance this website is in the apparel industry and i have the following main categories. Clothing Shoes Accessories Beauty Sub categories for clothing would be: Dresses Pants jeans Tops Products would be: Kelly Maxi dresses What is the best SEO Structure for this? Main categories obviously: www.example.com/clothing Sub Categories:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney
www.example.com/clothing/dresses Or www.example.com/dresses (Zappos seem to pursue the second type) Products:
www.example.com/clothing/dresses/kelly-maxi-dresses/ Or www.example.com/kelly-maxi-dresses ? Which one would be the best way to structure your site? Also what about filters that available in category pages? Say if i were to filter by color. what would be the best URL? I am sure canonical tag is needed here. New to Ecommerce SEO so i need some guidance! |0 -
Should /node/ URLs be 301 redirect to Clean URLs
Hi All! We are in the process of migrating to Drupal and I know that I want to block any instance of /node/ URLs with my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing them. My question is, should we set 301 redirects on the /node/ versions of the URLs to redirect to their corresponding "clean" URL, or should the robots.txt blocking and canonical link element be enough? My gut tells me to ask for the 301 redirects, but I just want to hear additional opinions. Thank you! MS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
Subdomain or Subfolder for Locations?
I have a client who is ranking #1 for every term related to "bathroom renovations (main city)". They have now started to take on dealers/franchisees in neighbouring cities, and each location would now like to be ranking for THEIR cities. Is it better to use bathcompany.com/location or location.bathcompany.com? Considerations: The site has the address and phone number of the main location listed in the header, so if we do /location you will still see the main NAP. Using /location, If someone browses beyond the location landing page, they will venture into pages that target the main city (ex. "Bath Remodelling (Main City)") Using a subdomain will mean that we will need to duplicate content such as their image gallery, and we will have to create new content for their service pages or risk duplicate content. (ex. "shower remodelling (city)") Questions By using /location they will benefit from the strength of the subdomain, while using a new location-based subdomain will this mean we will have to start from scratch in terms of domain authority / link-juice? Will the NAP in the header affect the ranking of these location pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
400 errors and URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools
On our website we do a lot of dynamic resizing of images by using a script which automatically re-sizes an image dependant on paramaters in the URL like: www.mysite.com/images/1234.jpg?width=100&height=200&cut=false In webmaster tools I have noticed there are a lot of 400 errors on these image Also when I click the URL's listed as causing the errors the URL's are URL Encoded and go to pages like this (this give a bad request): www.mysite.com/images/1234.jpg?%3Fwidth%3D100%26height%3D200%26cut%3Dfalse What are your thoughts on what I should do to stop this? I notice in my webmaster tools "URL Parameters" there are parameters for:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
height
width
cut which must be from the Image URLs. These are currently set to "Let Google Decide", but should I change them manually to "Doesn't effect page content"? Thanks in advance0 -
From an SEO Standpoint, which is better for my product category URLs?
With our e-commerce store, we can customize the URL for the product categories, so we could have: http://www.storename.com/product-category-keywords/ or http://www.storename.com/product-category-keywords.html From an SEO standpoint (or even from a "trying to get links" standpoint), which would be better to have? I feel like having a *.html category page would be easier for link building, but that's just my personal feelings. Side Note: Our product pages are: http://www.storename.com/product-name.html Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fenderseo0