Welcome to the Q&A Forum

oneresult

(PS. we are obviously going to thoroughly 301 the old to new URLs so we don't lose any linkjuice.)

oneresult

A site we are working on currently gives no indication of the subfolders in the URL. Eg. the site uses:

www.examplesite.com/brand-name

Rather than:

www.examplesite.com/popular-products/brand-name

There are breadcrumbs on site to show the user what part of the site they are in and how they navigated there.

We are building a new site and have to decide what route to take:

Since the site is already performing relatively well in the SERPs and the URLs are nice and short this way, is it a good idea to keep them like this or is it better for usability to include the subfolders?

This post suggests that we would be best off to keep the URLs as they are - particularly since less would be changed http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

Thanks in advance for your opinions!

Liz

@lizstraws

oneresult

You would have difficulty getting one site listed in more than one category of DMOZ:

"You should submit a site to the single most relevant category. " http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

Is there a main office location you could use?

Google Places would be really important for you- setting a listing up for each location and ensuring to link to the most appropriate subdomain of the client's site.

Liz

oneresult

Ok, this may be a better option in Webmaster tools, since you need to have added robots txt or "nofollow, noindex" to the pages...which we can't do because they are all one file.

Many thanks everyone

Liz

oneresult

Having talked to the guys and developers, while re-coding the whole site is not feasible for this project, we are going to prevent these pseudo pages being an issue by:

adding a rel canonical tag to the main pages
add the # symbol after the .php section of the code so that the search engines ignore it
request that Google remove the few URLs that may have been indexed

oneresult

Yes on second thoughts the URL structure would only need to be changed if the individual tabs were meant to be different pages, it's just that the coding has split them up, as you say.

oneresult

Thanks everyone so far, great stuff.

I did not build this site so I cannot speak for the way it was put together! I am not a developer at all but I can tell it is not the best solution.

So the best course of action seems to be, use the tag and then look into the time and costs associated with converting the URLs to a more friendly structure...

oneresult

Hi there

I have been working in / learning SEO for just over a year, coming from a non dev background, so there are still plenty of the finer points on-page points I am working on. Slowly building up confidence and knowledge with the great SEOMoz as a reference!

We are working on this site http://www.preciseuk.co.uk (we are still tweaking the tags and content by the way- not finished yet!)

Because a lot of the information is within accordians, a page is generated for each tab of the accordian expanded, for example:

http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php is the main page

but then you also have:

http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=0 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=1 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=2 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=3 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=4 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=5

All of which are in the same file.

According to the crawl test, these pages are not indexed.

Because it is all in one file, should we add the canonical tag to it, so that this is replicated in all the tab pages that are generated? eg.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Liz

OneResult
liz@oneresult.co.uk

oneresult