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Which idea did you decide against please? Surely having more paths would work better for breadcrumbs would it not?

Are you saying you think /courses/girls-only looks more spammy than /girls-only-course/ ?

Thank you

That was the idea really as there are around 20 or so courses. 5-10 camps ect... so a decent amount to gain benefit from the structure.

I don't think there is any risk to forgetting to add -courses to a page however and I'm wondering if I'd be poking the bear too much by changing all the urls fairly drastically if they dont need to so much.

I can still setup the content in courses, camps ect from the cms admin so it's easy for them to manage without a path/ impact.

But yes each section like that will and does have a landing page already pretty much its just in a page name not a clear structure.

So it sounds like adding the extra structure is probably fairly sensible... but maybe more risky than keeping the current structure?

No paths just /name-of-course-or-camp/ at present

Thanks,

I'm not sure I need to do the full structure now - I thought having paths maybe more of an indicator to the content type but maybe it'll be better to manage these like so:

URL - examplesnowboarding.com/splitboard-backcountry-intro-course/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/technical-performance-camp/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/girls-only-camp/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/private-lessons/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/group-lessons/

vs

URL - examplesnowboarding.com/courses/splitboard-backcountry-intro/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/technical-performance/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/girls-only/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/private/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/group/

Does anyone have a preference over which is better on a site with say 70 pages and a 300 post blog?

I should mentioned I've read up on keyword stemming so my gut feeling is that because "snowboarding" is in the domain name that I shouldn't have to repeat "snowboard" further down the url as it should be matched from the top level keyword "snowboarding"?

Hi all,

I'm restructuring a site that has been built with no real structure. It's moving over to HTTPS and having a full new development so it's a good time to tackle it all together.

It's a snowboard site and at the moment the courses, camps ect are all just as pages like:

examplesnowboarding.com/off-piste-backcountry/

I'm wanting to tighten the structure so it gives more meaning to the pages and so I can style them selectively and make it easier for the client to manage but I'm worried repeating the word snowboard too often will look spammy.

I'm wanting to do the following:

URL - examplesnowboarding.com/snowboard-courses/splitboard-backcountry-intro/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/snowboard-camps/technical-performance/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/snowboard-camps/girls-only/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/snowboard-lessons/private/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/snowboard-lessons/group/

The urls are clean and humanly descriptive but it does mean that the "snowboard" keyword is used a lot!

The other 2 options I thought of were like so (including snowboard in the page name not path)

URL - examplesnowboarding.com/courses/snowboard-splitboard-backcountry-intro/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/snowboard-technical-performance/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/snowboard-girls-only/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/private-snowboard/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/group-snowboard/

or simply removing "snowboard" as "snowboarding" is already in the main url

URL - examplesnowboarding.com/courses/splitboard-backcountry-intro/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/technical-performance/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/camps/girls-only/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/private/
URL - examplesnowboarding.com/lessons/group/

Any thoughts appreciated!

Thanks for the information Verb - the reason we track those other keywords separately from traffic is because I normally find their rank a good marker around the primary keywords but I understand what you're saying so there is more clarity in the focus.

I'll look for one of those tools and see if SEOprofiler works or similar. I've done the adwords method before but it's a bit laborious so I would prefer something automated if possible.

Thanks for the reassurance! It appears that yesterday evenings tracking in moz has updated and a lot of keywords have gone back up again so fingers crossed there was just a glitch / settling in phase!

Thanks

Hi Verb,

Normally the keyword / phrase ranking tool is updated weekly on moz and does seem to accurately reflect close to live data which is the main reason I'm perplexed. saying that I did just check a really simple keyword that moved to 50+ "french course morzine" that should easily be number 1 and it was.... so I wonder if whatever madness has happened will be reflected and put back on the next monthly update / weekly update.

We mainly use Google UK/GB for our campaign but do also have alternative language sites that are small but starting to grow.

I've attached a screenshot of the organic traffic it shows a pretty steady pattern of views.. feb received 800 sessions more than this time last year for instance. (again ignore july as thats when analytics was disconnected by accident).

I just don't know why Moz/Google would have us down for 12% visibility with our keywords and then decide to drop off so many of them to 50+ positions and the visibility of our site is now 7%ish for the same keywords / phrases..

Are you allowed to recommend keyword rank tracking tools to me that are outside of moz's products? or pm me some suggestions maybe?

Many thanks

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Hi Verb - yep the rank graphic is from Moz's tools. Green is keyword 1-3, blue is 3-10,ect and red is 50+ ie might as well not be ranked!

I should say the dip in july for traffic was purely because analytics was removed accidentally from the site and not spotted soon enough.

The main pattern I'm picking up on is showing how we've done well organically historically moving the same keywords up the rankings and then BANG this month we are almost seeing as many 50+ keywords as we had over 6 months ago! ie back to where we started almost... I've sent you a pm with the url!

Thanks very much

I'm still stumped as to why the ranking has gone so poor on a whitehat site. (see attached image)

As you can see we've steadily been improving the ranking over the last 6+ months and then got hit with a massive change this month... I can't physically see any issues and Moz isn't reporting anything negatively that would have such a major effect..

Like not as if the drops were subtle... they've all gone into the 50+ section!

Any insights into what may have changed in the latest algo update would be appreciated?!

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That is a very good shout!

Thanks Don,

I had read that article initially actually which is why I thought a few weeks was enough for it all to have settled back out but maybe I'm expecting a bit much for a 600 page site.

Many thanks for your help I'll maybe just be patient if there is nothing glaringly wrong

We did go from http to https about a month ago but we were careful that all the redirects and sitemaps were reflected correctly. I dont think there is an issue with the robots text (it is present and nothing weird blocking).

I'll take a look at those links and send you a pm - many thanks Don

Checking Webmaster Tools it looks like Google has unindexed 500 out of our 630 pages in the last 2 weeks.

Is there any reason for why this maybe?

Thanks for your input Donford,

I've had a look in OSE again and I can't see any spam links (all the genuine links are rated 0 through to 3) which looks very good. So it doesn't appear to be a negative campaign against me.

I may try Majestic for peace of mind... it makes it even more the stranger that we are being penalised so much

Thanks Eric,

There are a few languages of the site but as far as I'm aware no duplicate content in the same language but I will check with Siteliner just to be sure.

For disavowing backlinks - is this just via webmaster tools you are recommending to do that? If so we haven't done that yet but it seems sensible to try. When I last checked back links there were a few random sites that we certainly hadn't submitted to and looked spammy but when I went onto them we couldn't see our links.

Do you have a recommendation for a better backlink testing tool?

I am the developer for a fairly active website in the education sector that offers around 30 courses and has quite an actively published blog a few times a week and social profiles.

The blog doesn't have comments enabled and the type of visitor that visits is usually looking for lessons or a course.

Over the past year we have had an active input in terms of development to keep the site up to date, fast and following modern best practises. IE SSL certificates, quality content, relevant and high powered backlinks ect...

Around a month ago we got hit by quite a large drop in our ranked keywords / phrases which shocked us somewhat.. we attributed it to googles algorithm change dirtying the waters as it did settle up a couple of weeks later.

However this week we have been smashed again by another large change dropping almost 100 keywords some very large positions.

My question is quite simple(I wish)... What gives?

I don't expect to see drops this large from not doing anything negative and I'm unsure it's an algorithm change as my other clients on Moz don't seem to have suffered either so it's either isolated to this target area or it's an issue with something occurring to or on the site?

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