Any arguments against eliminating all (non-blog) subfolders?
-
Short URLs seem to do the trick from a UX perspective. For example: /primary-care vs. /why/specialties/primary-care . This convention will be applied over 30-40 pages. Note that while "/why/specialties/primary-care" isn't terribly ugly, some of our pages would look a little overly-keywordy if we go with the subfolder approach.
-
Having some level of structure in you site can be helpful for analytics, too. For Moz for example, we can look at everything happening on the blog by looking at /blog, everything on Q&A by looking at /community/q/, etc.
-
I prefer shorter URLs, but it depends on the size and structure of your site. If you have tens of thousands of pages, then using subfolders to organize things probably makes sense. Likewise, if your site has 5 main categories, it may make sense again to have 5 subcategories to give your site structure.
If you are changing directory structure for an existing site, be aware that you will likely see your rankings drop as Google tries to figure out the changes. 301 redirects do not pass all the link value, so you may need to do a bit of link building to get back up to your current level.
If it's just a few pages you want to redirect, you could also create a shortcut URL such as "domain.com/primary" that 301 redirects to the full URL ("why/specialists/primary-care") so that you can have a short URL that customers can memorize without sacrificing your site structure.
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
-
Trailing Slash and Non-Trailing Slash Inconsistency
Hi, Majority of the URLs on the site I'm working on are using non-trailing slash, https://example.com/page1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nerdieb
https://example.com/page2
https://example.com/page3 But when it comes to the blog pages, they are using trailing slash: https://example.com/blog/specific-blog-post1/
https://example.com/blog/specific-blog-post2/
https://example.com/blog/specific-blog-pos3t/ Note that there is no duplication here since they have canonical tags. My only concern is that:
Is it okay to have this kind of structure where the blog page have trailing slash while the rest are using non-trailing slash? Keen to hear from you guys. Cheers!0 -
Is there any problem if we migrate the entire site to HTTPS except for the blog ?
Hello guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newrankbg
I have a question to those of you, who have migrated from HTTP to HTTPS. We are planning to migrate the site of our customer to Always SSL. In other words, we want to redirect all site pages to HTTPS, except for the blog. Currently, the whole site is using the HTTP protocol (except the checkout page).
After the change, our customer's site should look like this: https://www.domain.com
http://www.domain.com/blog/ The reasons we do not want to migrate the blog to HTTPS are as follows: The blog does not collect any sensitive user information, as opposed to the site. We all know that on-site algorithms like Panda are having sitewide effect. If the Panda doesn’t like part of the blog (if any thin or low quality content), we do not want this to reflect on the rankings of the entire website. Having in mind that for Google, HTTP and HTTPS are two different protocols, a possible blog penalty should not reflect the web site, which will use HTTPS. Point 2 is the reason I am writing here, as this is just a theory. I would like to hear more thoughts from the experts here. Also, I would like to know your opinion, regarding this mixed use of protocols – could this change lead to a negative effect for any of the properties and why? For me, there should be no negative effect at all. The only disadvantage is that we will have to monitor both metrics – the blog and the site separately in webmaster tools. Thank you all and looking forward for your comments.0 -
Eliminate render blocking javascript and css recommendation?
Our site's last Red flag issue is the "eliminate render blocking javascript and css" message. I don't know how to do that, and while I'm not sure if I could spend hours/days cutting and pasting and guessing until I made progress, I'd rather not. Does anyone know of a plugin that will just do this? Or, if not, how much would it cost to get a web developer to do this? Also, if there is not plugin (and it didn't look like there was when I looked) how long do you think this would take someone who knows what they are doing to complete. The site is: www.kempruge.com Thanks for any tips and/or suggestions, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Cooking Recipes Blog Links
Hi, I am running an ecommerce store - cookware, bakeware, knives etc... I have someone I know personally that is a writer and one of her blogs is about cooking - lots of well established articles with keywords througout. Is there any harm in getting some inbound links from her blog on certain keywords? If so, should I limit the number of outgoing links per article she has? Any guidelines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Redirecting non-www pages to www ones
Hello:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
I'm trying to consolidate all the link juice and see that some of my pages are linked to by using both www.mysite.com/whatever.html and mysite.com/whatever.html.
Is there a safe re-write rule that not just redirects non-www(s) to www(s), but designates the redirect as 301, so link juice will be transfered as well. If not RewriteRule, are there any other ways to accoplishe this? And the last question: can this be solved by simply setting Preffered domain in google webmaster tools to display www URL? Any help will be appreciated.0 -
Rankings Up instantly after publishing new blog article
Hello All, My question is, why did my site rankings go up all of a sudden as soon as I published an article in my blog and it gets indexed (almost immidiately) The rankings increase are the following Keyword 1: from Top 5 to Top 1 Keyword 2: from Top 4 to Top 2 Keyword 3: from Top 16 to Top 3 Keyword 4: from no where to Page 2 (big time keyword) Any ideas or experience on this? When it first happened early this week(i published a new article), my site rankings dropped back after a couple of days. I did the same pattern by pubishing a new article and it went back up again. No personalized result here btw. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onecov0 -
How do I get the best from our Blog and build quality links and drive traffic to our site?
We have recently setup a Wordpress focused blog (blog.towelsrus.co.uk) which is very much work in progress. Because of financial constraints we had to host this on a separate sub domain. I need to get to grips with blogs is new to me (only been doing SEO this for 3 months now) and have have read may posts on the forums here that this is one of the best ways to build links and engage the audience. How do I go about getting people to read my blog, and should I use this to pull in traffic on keywords we cannot through the main site or should i use this to re-enforce and build traction on those keywords we are trying to rank for on the main site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Multiple blogs for seo
I have signed up for some rather expensive lawyer directories that have very high domain PR, 's of 6 or 7 . Some of these allow you to make blog posts or articles on their site which should be good for SEO because of the high domain PR. I understand that if I do a lot of posts on one of these blogs with links back to my site, I should rapidly reach the point of diminishing returns because they are all coming from the same domain. Therefore, I plan to mix up my blo posts betwee several of these sites and also rewrite them and post them on my own site's blog. My question is this, if I post on any of these sites and I link back to internal pages of my site, and not to the home page, does this offset the "diminishing returns" factor? Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes0