Keyword and URL
-
I have a client who has a popular name (like 'Joe Smith'). His blog URL has only his first name and the name of his company in it, like joe.company.com.
His blog doesn't rank well at all in the first 3-4 Google SERPs. I was thinking of advising him to change the URL of his blog to joesmith.company.com, and having his webmaster do 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one.
Do you think this is a good strategy, or would you recommend something else? I realize ranking isn't just about the URL, it's about links, etc. But I think making his URL more specific to his name could help.
Any advice greatly appreciated! Jim
-
Thanks so much your helpful advice. I really appreciate it! Jim
-
Maybe he has a company scheme for each employe to follow?
@james if your are building the subdomain only for seo / ranking reasons then Francisco is right, don't waste your time. maybe you go a little bit more into the details why you need a subdomain?
-
James, I had to read your question twice. Your client has a subdomain like joe.company.com and you want to redirect to joesmith.company.com?
Don't waste your time. Build quality links and watch the rankings go up. If creating a subdomain had the effect of having an exact match boost from Google, all of us here on SEOmoz would have created spammy sites. SEOmoz will not rank for SEO Tools by creating a subdomain seotools.seomoz.org
-
Hi Jim, if you are just starting / or Joe just produced a few content pages and didn't build up any incoming links you could change the name of the url and do a 301 to put more clarity for users looking for that name.
Next step will be to work hard, build good content & links.
A friend of mine has the same name as a famous football player but after 6 month he was able to outrank him. So be patient.
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
-
Changing Urls
Hi All, I have a question I hope someone can help me with. I ran a scan on a website and it has a stack of urls that are far too long. I am going through and changing the urls to shorter ones. But my question is regarding redirections. Wordpress seems to be automatically redirecting the old urls to the new ones, should i be adding a more solid 301 in as well or is the wordpress redirect enough? I ask as they dont all seem to stay redirecting Thanks in advance for the help
Technical SEO | | DaleZon2 -
Adding a parameter to the URL / URL Stracture
Dear Community, I would like to ask a question regarding url structure. We are struggling with shorting urls and we thought to add a "parameter" to the url. Example: domain.com/product**/a/** or domain.com**/a/**product/ Current url structure: domain.com/product/ So we go after and short url contains "/a/" and find the category we want. Is this going to harm our SEO strategies? Any idea is welcome.
Technical SEO | | geofil0 -
URL has caps, but canonical does not. Now what?
Hi, Just started working with a site that has the occasional url with a capital, but then the url in the canonical as lower case. Neither, when entered in a browser, resolves to the other. It's a Shopify site. What do you think I should do?
Technical SEO | | 945010 -
How to handle temporary campaign URLs
Hi, We have just run a yearly returning commercial campaign for which we have created optimized URL's. (e.g. www.domain.tld/campaign including the category and brand names after the campaign www.domain.tld./campaign/womens This has resulted in 4500+ URL's being indexed in Google including the campaign name, now the campaign is over and these URL's do not exist anymore. How should we handle those URL's? 1.) 301 them to the correct category without the campaign name 2.) Create a static page www.domain.tld/campaign to which we 301 all URL's that have the campaign name in them Do you have any other suggestions on what the best approach would be? This is a yearly commercial campaign so in a year time we will have the same URL's again. Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | eCommerceSEO0 -
Including spatial location in URL structure. Does subfolder number and keyword order actually matter?
The SEOMoz On-Page report for my site brings up one warning (among others) that I find interesting: Minimal Subfolders in the URL My site deals with trails and courses for both races and general running. The structure for a trail is, for example: /trails/Canada/British-Columbia/Greater-Vancouver-Regional-District/Baden--Powell-Trail/trail/2 The structure for courses is: /course/28 In both cases, the id at the end is used for a database lookup. I'm considering an URL structure that would be: /trail/Baden-Powell-Trail/ca-bc-vancouver This would use the country code (CA) and sub-country code (BC) along with the short name for the region. This could be good because: it puts the main keyword first the URL is much shorter there are only 3 levels in the URL structure However, there is evidence, from Google's Matt Cutts, that the keyword order and URL structure don't matter in that way: See this post: http://www.seomoz.org/q/all-page-files-in-root-or-to-use-directories If Matt Cutts says they aren't so important then why are they listed in the SEOMoz On-Page Report? I'd prefer to use /trail/ca-bc-vancouver/Baden-Powell-Trail. I'll probably do a similar thing for courses. Is this a good idea? Thoughts? Many thanks, in advance, for your help. Cheers, Edward watch?v=l_A1iRY6XTM watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I
Technical SEO | | esarge0 -
Blank Canonical URL
So my devs have the canonical URL loaded up on pages automatically, and in most cases this gets done correctly. However we ran across a bug that left some of these blank like so: Does anyone know what effect that would have? I am trying to provide a priority for this so I can say "FIX IT NOW" or "Fix it after the other 'FIX IT NOW' type of items". Let me know if you have any ideas. I just want to be sure I am not telling google that all of these pages are like the home page. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SL_SEM0 -
URL rewrite question
I have adjusted a setting in my CMS and the URL's have changed from http://www.ensorbuilding.com/section.php/43/1/firestone-epdm-rubbercover-flat-roofing to http://www.ensorbuilding.com/section/43/1/firestone-epdm-rubbercover-flat-roofing This has changed all the URL's on the website not just this example. As you can see , the .php extension has now been removed but people can still access the .php version of the page. What I want is a site-wide 301 redirect but can not figure out how to implement it? Any help is appreciated 🙂 Thanks
Technical SEO | | danielmckay70 -
Slashes In Url's
If your cms has created two urls for the same piece of content that look like the following, www.domianname.com/stores and www.domianname.com/stores/, will this be seen as duplicate content by google? Your tools seem to pick it up as errors. Does one of the urls need 301 to the other to clear this up, or is it not a major problem? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | gregster10000