What is the best URL structure for categories?
-
A client's site currently uses the URL structure:
www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname%
Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this:
Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons.
So I'm left with a few options:
- Remove the category from the URL
- Flatten the category hierarchy
- Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic.
- Leave it as it is
What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
-
Or
5. Shorten the keywords in the url post ie
title: Some Post titles are quite long as they are long tail terms
url: /parent-category/child-category/post-titles-long/
-
Thanks Tom, yes it's Wordpress - I do manually edit the slug to take out stop words and irrelevant words but sometimes its just not enough.
If I use digital marketing as an example, I may end up having:
How long is too long? No idea!
I'll just Snapchat Rand and ask him...
p.s. (Sorry if contentwhiz is you!)
-
Hi there,
I'm assuming you're using Wordpress? I think having the categories in the URL is a must if you're trying to rank and the category is one of your keywords for your website.
Personally, if I was having trouble with long URL's for the longer post titles (e.g. How to gain 1000 genuine followers on twitter, quickly and free == domain.com/social-media-tutorials/twitter/How-to-gain-1000-genuine-followers-on-twitter-quickly-and-free") I would probably remove certain generic words from the URL that Google wouldn't even search for anyway, so that my URL structure would become: domain.com/social-media/twitter/how-to/gain-1000-genuine-followers-twitter-free or words to that effect.
You are able to change the URL of the post (within Wordpress) as you Publish your post (under the post title field).
Hope this is of some help!
Tom
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
-
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Redirect to url with parameter
I have a wiki (wiki 1) where many of the pages are well index in google. Because of a product change I had to create a new wiki (wiki 2) for the new version of my product. Now that most of my customers are using the new version of my product I like to redirect the user from wiki 1 to wiki 2. An example of a redirect could be from wiki1.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen to wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen. Because of a technical issue the url I redirect to, needs to have a parameter like "?" so the example will be wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen? Will the search engines see it as I have two pages with same content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Debitoor
wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen
and
wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen? And will the SEO juice from wiki1.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen be transfered to wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen?0 -
Does this work as a tactic for including keyword in URL structure
Howdy, I'm planning out a website and need to plan out the URL structure for best SEO value. Generally I would do something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive
site.com/widgetssite.com/widgets/large
site.com/widgets/large/blue
etc. I think this is a pretty straight forward SEO tactic. The issue I have with it is in terms of natural language the "thing" you are searching for in this case is a widget, so typically you would type/search [adjective] [noun], or in this case "large blue widgets." So one proposal I have is to instead append the "widget" to the end of the URL:
site.com/large-widgets
site.com/large/blue-widgets
site.com/large/blue/square-widgets
etc. Obviously this breaks the whole silo concept since the square-widgets page is inside the /blue directory but the blue widgets page isn't at /blue it is /blue-widgets. My solution is to setup 301 redirects from /blue to /blue-widgets (even thought there are no site links pointing to that page). Does this seem like a good idea? Or does this break the whole folder silo concept? What I like about it is that it feels more user friendly in terms of natural language and for certain high value keywords we can get certain pairings of words into the URL more like how a person would type them in.0 -
Switching Url
I started working with a Roofer/Contractor about a year ago. His website is http://www.lancasterparoofing.com/. The name of his business is Spicher Home Improvements. He used to have spicherhomeimprovements.com, well he still does. He was focusing on Roofing and Siding but now would like to branch to other areas like Interior remodeling. So adding interior work under LancasterPaRoofing.com is not applicable. I do not think starting another domain and having two is the best option. I think he should go back to using SpicherHomeImprovements.com and I assume he would take a small hit but in time he should be better off. Plus the url is more applicable to the real name of his business. Thanks for any feedback I receive. Chad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChadEisenhart0 -
Are these URLs too Keyword-packed?
Hi guys, Here is the URL: http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/dog-stores-mailing-list.html The target keywords are "Dog stores mailing list" and "Dog stores mailing lists" Does having "mailing-list" and "mailing-lists" in my URL hurt me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Rewriting URL
I'm doing a major URL rewriting on our site to make the URL more SEO friendly as well as more comfortable and intuitive for our users. Our site has a lot of indexed pages, over 250k. So it will take Google a while to reindex everything. I was thinking that when Google Bot encounters the new URLs, it will probably figure out it's duplicate content with the old URL. At least until it recrawls the old URL and get a 301 directing them to the new URL. This will probably lower the ranking of every page being crawled. Am I right to assume this is what will happen? Or is it fine as long as the old URLs get 301 redirect? If it is indeed a problem, what's the best solution? rel="canonical" on every single page maybe? Another approach? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Dynamic URLs Appearing on Google Page 1\. Convert to Static URLs or not?
Hi, I have a client who uses dynamic URLs thoughout his site. For SEO purposes, I've advised him to convert dynamic URLs to static URLs whenever possible. However, the client has a few dynamic URLs that are appearing on Google Page 1 for strategically valuable keywords. For these URLs, is it still worth it to 301 them to static URLs? In this case, what are the potential benefits and/or pitfalls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0 -
Brackets in a URL String
Was talking with a friend about this the other day. Do Brackets and or Braces in a URL string impact SEO? (I know short human readable etc... but for the sake of conversation has anyone relaised any impacts of these particular Characters in a URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0