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Hi Moz-Mind,

We've got a bunch of duplicate content issues in our directory of trucking-related businesses, caused by search terms that can appear in any order, (classic mistake). We're taking advantage of this our work on URLs to try to improve our URL structure, and I'm not sure which way I want to go.

These are the options we're considering. What does the Moz-mind think of each of them?

• example.com/location-name/service-name
• example.com/service-name/location-name
• example.com/service-name-near-location-name

For the moment location-name would be a city & state abbreviation, like atlanta-ga, (unless it's better to use something else).

Since these are search URLs, it's also possible to add a distance restriction, and a keyword, to the search criteria. How do you suggest adding the distance restriction?

• example.com/service-name/location-name/50-miles
• example.com/service-name/within-50-miles/location-name
• example.com/service-name-within-50-miles-of-location-name

And the keyword?

• example.com/service-name/location-name/keyword
• example.com/service-name/location-name/keyword/{actual-keyword}
• example.com/service-name-near-location-name/keyword

Something else?

I was leaning toward example.com/service-name/location-name/within-50-miles, but I thought of the /service-name-near-location-name/ and /service-name/within-50-miles-of/location-name options today and really like how they make sense both to computers and to people, not unlike example.com/GA/atlanta/service-name/50

I'm looking forward to hearing what the community thinks. There must be an established best practice for directories, but if it's kind of ugly I'd like to find an even better way, if possible.

Thanks,

John

Unless there's a reason to take the 301s down, don't.

If you don't want to have to wade through them all when you're editing your .htaccess file you could monitor your server logs which should show all requests & responses your server receives & sends. When no requests for a URL, (and therefor no 301 responses happen), come in for some long period of time, (a month? 6 months? a year?), then you may be able to safely remove the 301 directive from your .htacess, (or wherever you configure your 301s).

Most of the data about the keyword + "near me" keywords came from GA - or its integration with the Webmaster Tools. This means I've got data about what the keywords are, where, and how many times, we've been in the SERPs, the # of clicks, & the click-through rate. Of course, the CTR is not super useful for comparison with other keywords if they're not at the same position in the search results.

Is the idea of running a small PPC campaign to see how well the "near me" version of a keyword converts vs. the non-"near me" version? That seems like a good idea, (I'm fairly new at doing any active SEO or Keyword Research). Once I've got that info I should be able to see if it's worth devoting resources to tracking "near me" - heck, I could even add a few geographic areas as well, so I would see how "tire repair near me" compares to "tire repair" compares to "tire repair nyc."

Thanks for the insight.

We're a directory of industry-specific services, so a lot of people find their way to our site by searching something like "tire repair near me." For every keyword we rank for, ("tire repair"), we also rank for the "near me" version, ("tire repair near me").

I'm looking for opinions on if is worth spending ~50% of the keywords included in my plan to track these "near me" keywords, or if we would be better off tracking some of the most important "near me" keywords, and some of those same base keywords on a local basis for major population centres, (for example "tire repair nyc").

What does the forum think?

Thanks for the link to the correlation article. I've seen the same effect - we have a competitor that seems to be beating everyone in the industry at SEO, but with half the domain authority of some other competitors - but he has a lot of +1s.

I'll take a look at how much action there is on G+ in our industry. We're having decent success on Facebook, and I think that's the main activity hub, but the followed links & some activity of G+ may well be worth any time spent on Google Plus.

We still don't know if any of this is changing, though, beyond your, (correct, I believe), observation that Google Plus is being detangled from the rest of Google's products.

I've noticed that Google Plus seems to have a larger influence on ranking than other social networks, especially for one of our competitors. We haven't started using Google Plus, and I'm wondering if, from an SEO standpoint, it's worth putting energy into after last month's changes.

TL;DR: After last month's changes, is Google Plus still an important ranking signal?