URL and SEO
-
How much weight do search engines give the URL? We're a medical call center provider and medicalcallcenter is part of our URL. Does that help us much?
Thanks!!
-
A competitor of mine has her name as the domain url and her keywords show on seomoz as "branded" and my same keywords show "Not branded"
Why is this?
-
Keith,
Thank you for this explanation. I was making it too hard and you just cleared it up for me.
Best,
Wendy
-
Hey Wendy,
I was just reading an article on exact match domains and thought it might be of use to you http://www.seomoz.org/blog/are-exact-match-domains-in-decline
-
A branded root domain = google.com, nike.com , apple.com etc any domain that uses a brand name and not a dictionary keyword's like "cheap-cars.com" or "cheapcars.com".
SEO's define a root domain as the domain name on it's own with no sub domain etc so google.com not www.google.com
-
Dear Davinia,
I am unclear on what branded root domain means. We use our name as branded keywords, but I assume that is not the same as branded root domain.
Thanks.
-
Hey Keith,
I did the same search and the keyword in the URL was not bold. Agreed don't use hyphens in the root domain (I do believe they help in folder paths), but anyway I feel that you and I could go on forever having a fun debate but I think we have made our points and from this Wendy will be able to make an informed decision, or at least our information has helped her to look in certain areas so she can do additional research.
Best regards,
Davinia -
Hey Davinia,
Check the screenshot attached, as you can see I searched for "medical call center" and in the first organic result it's parsed the domain for that keyword and made the keywords bold in the domain name.
Google's parse domains for for keywords, it's pretty basic stuff... You don't need to have a hypen (dash) in there as a delimiter any more (although this used to help years ago).
I was not simply suggesting building links to the home page will help (which it obviously will if done correctly), what I meant was there is little point building a page that as the same keywords as the domain and then building links to that page.
As the domain in question has the exact match keywords Wendy can use the home page to rank for those keywords without the need for an additional page targeting the keyword "medical call center".
Keith
-
The URLs don't have to be keyword heavy, they should be semantically in line with the content of the page and also be relevant, not only will this help as a ranking factor but it also allows for better authored search engine result page snippets (i.e. the keyword's will display in the URL on the SERP snippet), which in turn should help with click through rates.
A search engine isn't going to know that "medicalcallcenter" is "medical call center" so the URL doesn't include the keyword. Therefore adding the keywords to the file paths will get the keyword into the URL.
Agreed, building links to the homepage (and other important pages) would be a good idea.
-
If Wendy has a keyword heavy domain why not just build the links to the home page?! I would avoid repeating the keyword again in the URL if the domain already includes them...
I could understand this strategy if the domain was branded and did not include the target keywords, but that's not the case here.
Keith
-
I'd go for a branded root domain and when creating the file paths use keywords separated by hyphens, example:
www.medicalcallcenter.com
www.medicalcallcenter.com/medical-call-center
www.medicalcallcenter.com/healthcare-advice
www.medicalcallcenter.com/healthcare-advice/colds-flus -
The short answer is yes, google have reduced the weight of this (apparently) if i was picking a brand I would probably try to include a partial match for one of the head terms without it looking spammy if possible... (like SEOMoz.org).
Spammy keyword match domains (no1-cheap-car-insurance.com) don't look as pro a branded domain IMO.
Obviously this is only one ranking factor out of many...
Hope that helps,
Keith
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
-
Should I change my website urls?
We're translating our website in a few languages (FR / DE / JP) using subdirectories. So our website will have the following urls www.brand.com/en
On-Page Optimization | | dcalexandra
www.brand.com/fr
www.brand.com/de
www.brand.com/jp I would like to change the url structure of a few pages from www.brand.com/section/feature-name to www.brand.com/feature-name Is it a good idea to do this now since we're adding the subfolders and these are anyway new urls in google's eyes?0 -
Is my megamenu negatively impacting my SEO?
Hello everyone, I have a megamenu with 87 links in total. We offer a ton of products, so when we decided to have this developed, it seemed like a no-brainer because a straight drop-down menu was really hard to digest. But I have been wondering if it is creating too many links on every single page and/or muddling the signals to the search engines. If anyone could take a look and give me their insight, I would really appreciate it. Thanks, www.cleanedison.com
On-Page Optimization | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Infinite Scrolling Long Lists and SEO
Just curious if anyone else has tried this. I have pages with words that link to definitions. I have A LOT of them on a page and I am starting the process of trying to either do pagination (which I cant stand) or even cooler infinite scrolling where the page loads more words as the user scrolls. Good Bad for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
Impact in SERPs of SEO onpage efforts
Hi there! Once you have made the first SEO onpage efforts....When am I supossed to have the imact in the SERPs? Is there an average "timeframe" for that? I know that is important the linkbulding stratety (among other factors). Thanks in advanced.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Google Authorship for SEO Content Writers
I am interested to know the best way to go about about Google authorship on blog articles written for a client. For example is it a bad idea for an SEO content writer to publish articles under their own identity, what are the potential footprint downsides to this?
On-Page Optimization | | Clicksjim1 -
Long Url but makes no sense
Hi Just joined. Crawl states that I am getting a lot of errors, looks like the spider is getting confused and looping back on itself ? Is there a way to see where the crawl was formulated (ie where from) ? It is generating urls like: http://www.wickman.net.au/wineauction/wine_auction_alert.aspx/auction/auction/auction/auction/auction/auction/Default.aspx from http://www.wickman.net.au/wineauction/wine_auction_alert.aspx
On-Page Optimization | | blinkybill0 -
How to deal with tracking numbers in URLs
I am working on a site at the minute that has links like this: Jobs in London URL looks like: domain.com/jobs-in-london/ However, my developers insist that they need to use tracking codes, so everytime someone clicks on the above link, they are redirected (301) to a new URL that looks like: domain.com/search/1234567(unique search id) This is killing me when I am trying to get internal pages, like /jobs-in-london/ ranked. What to do?
On-Page Optimization | | MirandaP0 -
Hotspot area for SEO
Hi, we have an online store: http://www.redwrappings.com.au/ There's been a debate regarding which area is recognised to be the most important place/hotspot for SEO: Free delivery van area (top left panel) OR Top menu navigation Given that if you look at the page html source code, the top navigation loads last and the free delivery fan area is the first one to be read in the html source code. We did this because we want the body page content (h1 & text content) to be read first by search engine robot & also the body can load faster for the user. Is this the right thing to do or we better off load the top navigation first? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Essentia0