Question about web site structure
-
Is there an SEO advantage for individual pages to be in sub folders vs not being in a folder? Of course site managemnt is easier with folders if you have 100;s of pages...clearly a shorter URL is easier for humans to naviagte.
vs.
-
I'm not sure I understand your question John, and the second URL is a 404. Could you expand your question a bit? Thanks!
-
Hi Keri and community,
So is it a link juice mistake on my site
www.shearerpainting.com/recyclepaint.index
I created the sub folder and landing page specifically for a new campaign "recycle paint" with video and content and links
-
I've gone ahead and marked this thread as answered, even though we haven't heard from John. Thanks for your great recap!
-
Hi John. I'm surprised this question isn't considered answered yet as the group seems to touch on all the bases. Here's a recap:
- Richard Getz highlights the ability to add keywords via folders but cautions against adding too many folders (historically due to crawling issues).
- David Lenehan cautions against too many folders causing duplicate content issues and ungainly website architecture.
- Keri Morgret highlights the usefulness of folders in Analytics to help track specific portions of content. The moz also discusses this in their excellent post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-powerful-analytics-tip-every-website-should-employ
"By segmenting out traffic to URLs that include /blog/ and those that include /ugc/ (YOUmoz), we can see when/where/how each section is rising or falling in traffic and contributing to the overall site's performance."
- Fatwallet cautions against spam negating benefits in either and emphasizes linking as driving more value regardless.
- Aaron Dicks recommends a CMS to give you strength and flexibility in organizing your content.
- While Pashmina reminds us of the usefulness of redirects when curtailing duplicate content or sending lost link strength to a page in greater need.
And finally since you were asking about domain\folder\page vs domain\page you're not going to run into subdomain issues. If a short folder category makes since in analytics it's definitely worth it. Just look at the URL above... we're in the 'q' folder. Hope that helps.
-
John,
Did any of these responses answer your question, or do you still have more questions? If you could add a comment or mark a helpful response, that'd be great!
-
There are a lot of answers on here with regards to .html files and folders. The most efficient and easily-manageable solution here is to migrate to a good Content Management System that can handle categorys and page parents (I prefer Wordpress)
Products can be categorised one or two deep (suggested max for Search Engines) and URL's will reflect the product description. I.e is the item is a widget or type foo, being in url www.example.com/foo/widget/product-name would be a great structure, as both foo and widget might be part of the search term for the product, and they will also appear on the product page naturally as you describe the product.
This also helps the Keyword cannibalisation problem, as you will be able to see through administration that there are multiple pages doing the same thing.
Essentially in answer to your question, go one or two deep if it will help your users. Don't go more than 2 as Search Engines may not crawl that far if you have a young/non-authorative domain.
Hope this helps,
Aaron
-
I am gonna vote up with 1 folder level. There is no evidence of it, but its possibly that the juice would not pass through as well if there are many directories/sub-directories
-
I agree with Richard and Joel. No more than 3 levels deep for categories. And I'd like to add, that it's good to create redirects for alternative categories or links. If a product can belong to 2 sub categories, have both links work. eg. domain.com/category/subcategory-primary/product.html -> would be main link domain.com/category/subcategory-secondary/product.html -> would redirect to above And while this is not necessarily an SEO advantage, having clean, short and organized categories helps create a good user experience and easy way finding for your users and leads to higher conversion rates.
-
That's a really good point.
I'm glad GA form fields accept regular expressions
-
Don't overlook the usefulness of folders when it comes to Google Analytics. Lunametrics has a post on designing a site that is friendly with GA at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.
-
Google is going to trust your link structure more than the subdirectories in the url.
Make your urls clean, try to get a good keyword in there, but DON'T stuff and make them obnoxious and spammy.
There IS typically an advantage to a flatter architecture, but if the content is rich and the longer tail potential is high a deeper architecture will serve just fine.
-
Too many sub folders isn't good for SEO and you can have problems with duplicate content. Personally I would go with the first option. I try to ensure products have the following URL structure
store.com/product-laser-gadget.html
You need to avoid the following situation;
store.com/gadget/product-laser-gadget.html
-
Thanks Joel can you give me an example?
www.donuts/glazed/chocalate glazed
-
If Susan does not get you some backlinks, nothing will
-
Richard you are going to laugh...so I just made a new video and added sitemap, and I am jacked up about getting another keyword in so i made
http://www.shearerpainting.com/PaintColors/susanmarinello.php
but my HTML is so poori cant figure out menu's page architecture, blah , blah so I tempoarily put this up:
-
None that I can think of.
If you have categories, it not only allows the use of another keyword, but you get to make a landing page for that keyword. domain.com/category/index.php would be used for keywords and also redirecting link juice once a product was deleted as explained here: (scroll to the bottom)
http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-do-you-do-about-links-to-constantly-moving-pages
When you link build, you can use these landing pages to point links to. Also good for link baiting.
There are several reasons to have these types of pages. It would depend on what your site is composed of, but you can add videos, how-tos, related blog post, etc.
All of which get a user in a direction, attract links, and help get link juice to deeper pages.
-
Thanks Richard, Is there any advantge to have all my pages only go 1 deep?
-
Sure, the most obvious is the use of a keyword, but don't go more than 3 deep. domain.com/category1/category2/product.html
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
-
How do you influence the default site title?
Hi, We have noticed that on brand searches, a site's page title is replaced with the name of the site or the business, we can understand that this is due to the fact that a CTR enticing title is not as important when the customer is looking for a certain brand. What tells Google what company name to display in this instance? We're having trouble with our French site displaying the page title, we are moving the position of the title code earlier in the page, but can't see why a) Telefleurs is not displaying the title chosen and b) why it is displaying EuroFlorist when our French brand is Telefleurs. Any advice on this would be much appreciated! Thanks, Sam JgLwnGV.png
Web Design | | seoeuroflorist0 -
Old site to new WordPress site - Client concerned about Yahoo Ranking
Hello, Back Story I have a client (law firm) who has a large .html website. He has been doing his own SEO for years and it shows. I think the only reason he reached out to a professional is because he got a huge penalty from Google last fall and fell very far down in rankings. Although, he still retains a #1 spot in Yahoo for his site for the keyword phrase he wants. I have been creating a new WordPress theme for the client and creating all new pages and updating the formatting/SEO. From the beginning I have told the client that when we delete the old site and install a new WordPress site (same domain name, but different page hierarchy) he will take a bump in the search engines until all the 301 redirects get sorted out. I told him I can't guarantee any time frame of how long the dip in SEO will last. Some sites bounce right back while others take longer. Last week, during a discussion, he tells me that if he loses his #1 ranking on Yahoo for any length of time he thinks he will go out of business. Needless to say I was a little taken back. When it comes to SEO I use best practice techniques, do my research, stay on top of trends but I never guarantee rankings when moving to a new site. I'm thinking of ways I can help elevate any type of huge SEO drop off and help the client. Here is what I was thinking of suggesting to the client and I would love some feedback. Main Question He has another domain he isn't doing anything with. It's pretty much his domain name with pc added. I was thinking about using that domain to create a simple 1-2 page WordPress website with brand new content (no duplicate content) aimed at attracting his keyword phrase. I would do as much SEO as I could with a 1-2 page site and give it a month or so to see if this smaller site can get into the top #10 in Yahoo, or higher. Then, when we move the site he will still have a website on the first page of Yahoo for his keyword phrase. I hope I explained it clearly 🙂 I would be open to any suggestions anyone may have. Thanks
Web Design | | Bill_K0 -
Time On Site and SEO?
Does time on site impact rankings? If a person visits your site from the serps or directly visits it by typing in your name in the search field and then leaves within a minute, will that impact your serps? What is the best way to increase time on site?
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Site down for more than a month - lost rankings
Hello, We have run into a situtation where we had multiple pages setup for different keywords but didn't realize that we had a name server issue that has caused the pages to be down for the last month or so (2-3 weeks on the low side.) The rank finder was still working fine, but the offline page was never reported. We realized the situation recently and have since gotten the sites back online under the new nameservers. Most of these sites were ranking 1 and 2 spots in their keywords, and now are no where to be found in the Google Index. Should I do anything differently, or just put the sites back online and wait it out? I have seen in different places that it may only take 2 weeks to come back, but it's possible that Google has marked the sites as 'not quality' because of their downtime and it will be even harder to get them to rank again. Can anyone shed any light on this situation? Any information is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | EQ-Richie0 -
Site Re-Design - Running old XML site map for 301's
Hi all, We are going to launch a new site design for our current e-commerce site. I have taken this opportunity to change some categories due to keyword research and all old categories will be 301ed to best fitting new category. So I have 2 questions about moving stuff over; 1. I read that leaving the old xml site map running for the first week, would help, because this would give crawlers the chance to run through the site and follow the 301s, which would help pass the juice. How true does this sound? 2. I was thinking of re-writing all category and sub category titles, meta descriptions and on page content. The positive of this is loads of fresh content - but doing this all at the same time with the new site launch might see some major dropping in search ranking. I've identified our top traffic keyword terms/pages, would it be more wise to leave these pages, and change the others, or would the total new fresh burst have a better impact? Cheers
Web Design | | ToxicFox0 -
Mobile Web Sites
Hi I have started offering customers a mobile app view of their existing websites using sencha touch which works well. On visiting the website if a user visits via a mobile device they access the mobile app view of the site. I am looking for some best practice please - as many of the customers already have hosting with their existing website so would it be possible to use a subdomain of m.theirdomain.com which will point to the mobile website which will be hosted on our servers in the cloud. Or is the only alternative to use a subdomain for their mobile sites because they are hosted with us in the cloud of businessname.ourdomain.com ? Many Thanks
Web Design | | ocelot0 -
Duplicate content on mobile sites
Hi Guys We are launching a mobile webshop later this year and have decided to use a subdomain for this. (m.domainname.xx). The content will be more or less identical with the one on the standard desktop site (domainname.xx), but im struggeling to find out if this will create dipplicate content between the mobile and desktop site. Does anyone have a solid answer for this one?
Web Design | | AndersDK0 -
Setup of three major retail sites.. need advice.
I recently have taken a new position responsible for three large national retail sites which are all owned by one parent organization. Through a series of acquisitions, these three major brands have been brought under one umbrella and a brand consolidation is likely not to happen within the next 2-4 years. I have a number of questions I’m hoping to get some feedback on, but first a little more background is necessary. A year ago (before my time) the three sites were over-hauled, but were designed to use one common custom CMS and all of the navigation and nearly all the content is the same (with some exceptions, such as tags, url, etc.). All of the brands have identical products and services; however, each one services a different demographic in the US. The design was intended for ease of management, but is terrible for seo. Additionally, without the geographic reference, they all compete for the same keywords. They have now begun a very large ecommerce project utilizing an ATG platform. The initial direction is to use one platform for all three brands, but keep them on separate domains and with the use of basic switching, replace nominal content such as logos and references of the brands for each of the domains. I’m concerned with this approach and would like to hear your feedback.. When optimizing a page for one keyword set, are they likely to be filtered due to dup content? The argument that management has is that all three current sites rank very well for one keyword on all three sites. They feel it won’t be an issue due to this. One option, that is currently still available, is to tri-band one ecommerce site, but it would have to be on an entirely new domain. The other three domains are very well established and are PR6s. Management, and even I, is afraid to abandon these other domains, but having a single domain would allow us to have unique content and really leverage all efforts to one domain. Thoughts? Any knowledge or thoughts what kind of impact having three domains on one ATG platform will be? Thanks much! John If you feel it will help, please message me and I can share the urls... Also, how would you handle a company blog in this case?
Web Design | | kavaliauskas0