The URL Inside
-
Howdy SEO'ers,
I have a quick question for the SEO gurus out there.
When constructing "better" search friendly URLs would one of these be better than the other?
Example 1:
http://Domain.com/Category/Sub-Category/Product-name
Example 2:
http://Category.Domain.com/Sub-Category/Product-name
In this example the category could be phones and the sub-category brands of phones.
Is either one of these URLs "better" than the other in terms of ranking?
Thanks!
I'll hang-up and listen to your answer.
Jonathan
-
Mystripping the category is "safer", because I've seen so many eCommerce that assign a product to more then 1 category. This causes at least 2 urls with the same content... Duplication with all the risks dupes have for a site health.
-
I agree with Gianluca and for the reasons he provided.
Alan, I could not get the URL link you shared to work, but it seems Matt is directly referring to the crawling and indexing of the page, not the ranking.
The ranking of the page has much greater potential on an established site with DA rather then on a sub-domain which does not have the DA of the main site.
The only part of Gianluca's advice which seems debatable is whether or not to include the category in the URL. I am sure you will find solid SEO reasons to support both methods.
-
Gianluca is absolutely correct. Example one (main site) is much better. Subdomains were used by spammers many years ago and are no longer a good strategy.
For every subdomain you make for each product you're basically creating a separate site too which needs to be put into GWMT seperately, so that gets a little crazy. It's just not a good strategy, even when someone wants to create a blog only for their site I tell them to put it under the main domain for PR and Google webmster compliance reasons, and you're talking about creating dozens of subdomains. There is only downside to doing it that way.
Good luck
-
I would have to disagree
Matt Cutts December 10, 2007 at 10:48 am
<dd class="comment byuser comment-author-matt-cutts bypostauthor even thread-even depth-1">
“Which one is to be expected to be indexed and show on Google first; subdomain or subdirectory?”
Harith, to the best of my knowledge neither one has an advantage for crawling/indexing first.
</dd>
OK its old, but i could not find any metion after that date.
What i think is important is if the appear to be diffrenct sites, this can be the same for subdirectories -
Discard the subdomain option, because it's a link building killer. A subdomain is an independent site for the search engine respect the main domain, therefore you would have to do X link building campaign for the X category of product you have. Then all the link gained by a subdomain would not have ranking value for the others, because they a different sites. Therefore, for categories, the best is: www.domain.com/category. For the product page the best is always to strip the categories and subcategories from the URL: www.domain.com/product. This diminishes a lot the risk of duplication content, that can appear when you assign a product to more than category or subcategory.
-
This question has been asked many times, and i would say that they are the same if linked well. i would cross link them so that they do not look like seperate sites.
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
-
Anyone know the benefit of URLs being in the target language?
For example, a page targeting the spanish language, does it make a difference if the URL is site.com/i-don't-speak-spanish vs site.com/no-habla-espanol
On-Page Optimization | | LennyO0 -
Having country in page url, good idea or bad idea?
Lets say i sell louisville hockey sticks if i have a page url as louisville-hockey-sticks-canada is this better than louisville-hockey-sticks I have a .CA domain
On-Page Optimization | | garmatinc0 -
Change of URL + SEO Impact
We recently changed the URLs from our site http://www.website.com (old)
On-Page Optimization | | ederdesign
https://website.com/us/en/ (new) Our ranking is plummeting every since and I wonder if the new URL had something to do with it. Do you know if that change, could have impacted the ranking?0 -
Redirect both / and non-/ URLs?
I am doing SEO on WP site. Due to some duplicate pages (rel canonical was done before) I am doing 301 redirects at the moment. And I wonder if I need to redirect both links w/ and w/o trailing slash. Default is non www, w/o trailing slash. Like there is .com/category/news but there is same page linked in .com/news (well it works when permalink structure is set to /%category%/%postname% and returns 404 error when structure is set to /%postname%).
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ
I redirected .lt/naujienos to .lt/category/naujienos. Should I also redirect .lt/naujienos/ (with trailing slash)? There's absolutely no problem redirecting this, but there are some more pages which I want to edit their URLs and I wonder If I should do both redirects from links /w and w/o slash?1 -
Can we listed URL on Website sitemap page which are blocked by Robots.txt
Hi, I need your help here. I have a website, and few pages are created for country specific. (www.example.com/uk). I have blocked many country specific pages from Robots.txt file. It is advisable to listed those urls (blocked by robots.txt) on my website sitemap. (html sitemap page) I really appreciate your help. Thanks, Nilay
On-Page Optimization | | Internet-Marketing-Profs0 -
404 crawl errors with all url+domain
We have 187 crawl 404 errors. All urls on web make a 404 error that this http://www.domain.com/[.....]l/www.domain.com all errors added to the url, the url domain I put an example gestoriabarcelona.com/www.gestoriabarcelona.com
On-Page Optimization | | promonet
gestoriabarcelona.com/tarifas/www.gestoriabarcelona.com
gestoriabarcelona.com/category/noticias/page/7/www.gestoriabarcelona.com
gestoriabarcelona.com/2012/08/amortizacion-de-unaconstruccion/
www.gestoriabarcelona.com
[..] I don't know where can i find to solve errors Anyone can help me? Thanks0 -
Canonical URL Tag
Hi, I have two pages that are identical on my site: http://www.absolutepower.nl/creatine-monohydraat and http://www.absolutepower.nl/CREATINE/creatine-monohydraat Should I use the canonical URL tag in this case? Thanks, Jasper
On-Page Optimization | | Japking0 -
Absolute vs Relative URLs
What are the pros and cons of these two types of URLs and what type of weight does this hold. It doesn't seem to be a big issue in regards to ranking. Any qualified clarity would help.
On-Page Optimization | | Romancing0