Link Structure June 2019
-
Question Which link structure is better in 2019 for best SEO practice
Example A) https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/soft-plastic-lures/
Or B) https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing/fishing-lures/soft-plastic-lures/
We're on the bigcommerce platform and used to have
https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/categories/soft-plastic-lures/
Last year we went from bigcommerce long URL to short to bypass the link juice being sent to /categories
Now we have an SEO company trying to sell me their services after a bit of a steady decline since september 2018 and told me that we should have link structure as example B and that is likely the reason for the dip.. Due to breadcrumbing, True or False?
I explained i had bread crumb like shown in https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/berkley-powerbait-t-tail-minnow/ buy the SEO guy said no it needs to be in the URL structure too.I was under the impression that Short urls opposed to long was better these days and link juice is passed better if it is short url direct to the point? Am i wrong?
-
We agree with Gaston. Our experience is that it almost is never worth the time to change URL structures on an established site. Instead, focus time and effort on creating more and better content, adding more internal links, and doing legit link building.
For example, we looked at this blog post, https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/blog/chasebaits-lure-range/, where you highlight four separate lures but you only link to one of the product pages instead of all four. Furthermore, you linked only once using a "Shop Now" button. We'd recommend adding another link to that product page linking the text of the name of the product somewhere above the "Shop Now" button within the content talking about that specific lure.
-
Hi Ben,
Short answer: URL structure has too small of an impact on Google rankings.
Long answer:
I work in XXXL e-commerce and had similar discussions and eventually tested different approaches. We saw no gain in rankings nor in impressions.
Also, hired some of the world best agencies and consultants to help us out. They came to the same conclusion. We cannot argue the data of our experiments.- Tested in different categories and in different countries.
There is also, the discussion that having a shorter URL helps in rankings has been addressed by John Mueller in some Google Webmaster Hangouts (currently can't find it), he said that it makes little to no difference. Instead of focusing on changing your internal systems and structures, use that energy and resources to improve user experience and content on the site.
There is a great possibility that your decline in Google traffic is due to other deeper issues. I'd suggest you and your team focus more on competitive analysis and trends on user behavior that trying to change the whole website URL structure.
A neat tip that I've sometimes been given is, check your internal linking. You might probably be linking too much or too little to your best pages.As you may imagine, this is not a simple issue. There is no clear actionable and probably just one change won't revert that steady decline.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston
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
-
Shopfiy Technical SEO: Internal Linking Structure
Hi Community, While Shopify’s canonical tag properly points to the preferred version of the URL (i.e./product/product-title), internal links still point to the various non-canonical versions throughout the site. For example, in collection pages, each product thumbnail links to non-canonical URLs (i.e. /collection/collection-title/products/product-title). I know it is not good as we have to keep the linking consistent. So, I read a blog post by Moz and changed the internal link to the canonical URL(i.e./product/product-title). My change is from{{ product.url | within: collection }} to {{ product.url }}. Very interestingly, I can manage the change for some collections but some collections don't work. Can you please suggest how I can change fix the linking for all collection pages? One of the collection example that works: https://shopmtn.eu/collections/dirty-rigger ; One of the collection example that doesn't work: https://shopmtn.eu/collections/truss My Shopify Template: Parallax. THANK YOU VERY MUCHbN1Heqq zoyDPco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media0 -
Slideshare - Links within
Hi Guys I am going to be putting some powerpoint presentations up over time. I have a couple of questions regarding slideshare. If I add links to the slideshare are these crawl able by Google etc...? If I places the powepoint presentation on our website and slideshare would this be counter productive i.e duplicate content? Love to here your suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
Link building
ok mozers i have a few questions. I am starting a new seo campaign and i want to target traffic for "how to make money on autopilot" Question 1. when it comes to link building i have seen some articles saying that i should not send all of my links to my landing page at once but to send links to my backlinks then index then using tiered link building. Is this a must or not? will i get penalized if i build 20 targeted links to my landing page in 1 day, lets say 20, pr7-9 domains? or should i tier it out and link maybe 5 pr9 domains to my landing page, then link 10 pr5 domains to each of those 5 pr9 domains and maybe link 20-pr1 domains to each of those tiered 2 pr5 domains? eq: Tier 1 = 5 PR-9 Tier 2 = 50 PR-5 Tier 3 = 1,000 PR-1 Question 2. Is their a certain amount of backlinks i need to use in order to out do my competitor? or does it just matter on the metrics of my backlinks? and when it comes to indexing these links do i need to index just the 5 pr9 links? or do i need to index all of them? or should i just index the landing page through google webmasters tools and hope it indexes all connecting pages? will doing any of these get my landing page indexed faster in order to rank faster? Question 3. Types of link building. Ok i am targeting guest blogs, wordpress sites, etc to put a link on. Should i focus on smm 'social media marketing' as well? or can i just focus on the traditional seo tactics first? Question 4. Keyword research. ok so my blog post is 'how to make money on autpilot' and from my keyword suggestion tools it picked up a list of keywords suggestions to target. Competition ranges from low to high, search volume ranges from 10 to 1900 visitors per month, after organizing the most relevant keywords to add to my campaign should i target each of the these keywords by creating a link building campaign for each one and target it to my landing page or use it as my 2nd or 3rd tier? those are the questions i really have for now. Here is my blog post http://www.vemomedia.com/how-to-make-money-on-autopilot/ Please feel me in on what i am needing to do in order to get some ranking and on how to run a link building campaign the correct way. Thanx in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djgbshows1 -
Should I try to change these links or no?
Hey guys, I need some advice on a link profile I'm currently working on. Our client sells a product in the hunting industry and has been around for over ten years. I just finished up classifying and looking at all of their links today and found that around half of them are sponsor links, links on "link pages," and a few directory links with almost all of them being followed. Because we are the first company to do SEO for them, I know that these aren't maliciously solicited links, but I'm worried that they may be having a negative impact on the site. Most of the links are coming from other non-competing websites in the outdoor industry which typically tends to have very antiquated sites with very antiquated practices. Essentially, I don't want to go out and try to nofollow or disavow all of these links that the website has had for a long time on other related websites if they're helping us, but I also don't want to be leaving anything up that could algorithmically be identified as spam. Below are some examples to show you what I'm referring to by the sponsor links and link resource pages. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks! Sponsored - http://www.becomeabetterhunter.com/ or http://outdoorobsession.tv/ or http://thehollywoodhunter.com/ Link Resource Pages - http://bowhuntamerica.com/links or http://cornerarchery.com/CompanyLinks.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CaddisInteractive0 -
Ecommerce Internal Linking Questions
I am a bit confused at internal linking for ecommerce site. Is it wise to link say all "boots" term in the review section to the boots page? Zappos is doing this. Wouldn't this incur penguin penalty? Since all internal anchor to that page is "boots" ? Scroll down to the bottom and checkout their reviews: http://www.zappos.com/tony-lama-6071l Is this the wise way to go about doing internal linking? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
Relevancy of link profile
Hi! I'm doing an audit of http://www.stevesims.com/ at the moment, who has had rankings for 'website designers' plummet recently. Looking at the site, there a few things to do with on-page and on-site optimisation, but nothing major. Instead, I think the link profile is the issue. There's a lot of site wide links from non-relevant sites, but I'm struggling to see anything else. Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Adding Links Under Embedded Videos?
What's the current opinion of adding do-follow links under video embed codes? Like what Vimeo does. Is this allowed, or does Google/Matt Cutts suggest always no-following these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DojoGuy0