URL's for news content
-
We have made modifications to the URL structure for a particular client who publishes news articles in various niche industries. In line with SEO best practice we removed the article ID from the URL - an example is below:
http://www.website.com/news/123/news-article-title
http://www.website.com/news/read/news-article-titleSince this has been done we have noticed a decline in traffic volumes (we have not as yet assessed the impact on number of pages indexed). Google have suggested that we need to include unique numerical IDs in the URL somewhere to aid spidering. Firstly, is this policy for news submissions? Secondly (if the previous answer is yes), is this to overcome the obvious issue with the velocity and trend based nature of news submissions resulting in false duplicate URL/ title tag violations? Thirdly, do you have any advice on the way to go?
Thanks
P.S. One final one (you can count this as two question credits if required), is it possible to check the volume of pages indexed at various points in the past i.e. if you think that the number of pages being indexed may have declined, is there any way of confirming this after the event?
Thanks again!
Neil
-
Hi Neil,
Your URL structure is affecting Google News. There is information here about the URL structure requirements, which can be waived if you use a Google News sitemap. http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=151309.
I don't know of any way to see the number of pages indexed historically, unfortunately.
-
SO, for this one, make a small research on any news website, and on the seomoz blog articles, you will see every url is unique, and for this question, i prefer you urgently to read the seomoz ebook for starters, and read the next book from Randfishkin,and another seos, the name of book is: http://www.amazon.com/Art-SEO-Mastering-Optimization-Practice/dp/0596518862
and google website optimizing, you must understand the search engine friendly,really good, how to make urls,why, what kind of url, avoid the duplicate content, page=moves, because you are moving the published articles, to the new url, and this make a duplicate content on the google-crawl.
But the best answer is, read the art-of-seo ebook,and you will learn all and do perfectly.
hope it helps,
thanks
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
-
Is this a true rel=nofollow for the whole article? "printfriendly.com" is part of the URL which is why I'm confused.
Is the rel=nofollow tag on this article a true NoFollow for the whole article (and all the external links to other sites in the article), or is it just for a specific part of the page? Here is the article: https://www.aplaceformom.com/blog/americans-are-not-ready-for-retirement/ The reason I ask is that I'm confused about the code since it has "printfriendly.com..." as a portion of the URL. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | dklarse0 -
How to properly change your website's address in Webmaster Tools?
Hi There,We've launched a new website and as part of the update have changed our domain name - now we need to tell Google of the changes: Both sites were verified in Webmaster Tools From the old site's gear icon, we chose "Change of address" As part of the "Change of address" checklist Google presented, we added 301 redirects to redirect the old domain to the new one But now that the 301 redirects are in place, Google can no longer verify the old site And because it can no longer verify the old site, Google won't let us complete the change of address form How do we tell Google of the change of address in this instance - and has anyone else encountered this?CheersBen
Technical SEO | | cmscss0 -
Duplicate Content with ADN, DNS and F5 URLs
In my duplicate content report, there are URLs showing as duplicate content. All of the pages work, they do not redirect, and they are used for either IT debugging or as part of a legacy system using a split DNS, QAing the site, etc... They aren't linked (or at least, shouldn't be) on any pages, and I am not seeing them in Search Results, but Moz is picking them up. Should I be worried about duplicate content here and how should I handle them? They are replicates of the current live site, but have different subdomains. We are doing clean up before migrating to a new CMS, so I'm not sure it's worth fixing at this point, or if it is even an issue at all. But should I make sure they are in robots or take any action to address these? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | QAD_ERP0 -
Why are my URL's changing
My rankings suddenly dropped and when trying to understand why I realized that nearly all images in Google's cached version of my site were missing. In the actual site they appear but in the cached version they don't. I noticed that most of the images had a ?6b5830 at the end of the URL and these were the images that were not showing. I am hoping that I found the reason for the drop in rankings. Maybe since Google cannot see a lot of the content it decided not to rank it as well (particularly since it seems to happen on thousands of pages). This is a cached version of my site I am using the following plugins that might be causing it: Yoasts SEO plugin, W3 total cache. Does anyone know what is causing ?6b5830 to be added to the end of most of my URL's? Could this be the reason for the ranking drop? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Duplicate content vs. less content
Hi, I run a site that is currently doing very well in google for the terms that we want. We are 1,2 or 3 for our 4 targeted terms, but havent been able to jump to number one in two categories that I would really like to. In looking at our site, I didn't realize we have a TON of duplicate content as seen by SEO moz and I guess google. It appears to be coming from our forum, we use drupal. RIght now we have over 4500 pages of duplicate content. Here is my question: How much is this hurting us as we are ranking high. Is it better to kill the forum (which is more community service than business) and have a very tight site SEO-wise, or leave the forum even with the duplicate content. Thanks for your help. Erik
Technical SEO | | SurfingNosara0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
Is it worth changing our blog post URL's?
We're considering changing the URL's for our blog posts and dropping the date information. Ex. http://spreecommerce.com/blog/2012/07/27/spree-1-1-3-released/ changes to http://spreecommerce.com/blog/spree-1-1-3-released/ Based on what I've learned here the new URL is better for SEO but since these pages already exist do we risk a minor loss of Google juice with 301 redirects? We have a sitemap for the blog posts so I imagine this wouldn't be too hard for Google to learn the new ones.
Technical SEO | | schof0 -
If I redirect my WordPress blog to my main site, will it help my main site's SEO?
I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...
Technical SEO | | matt-145670