How to set up internal linking with subcategories?
-
I'm building a new website and am setting up internal link structure with subcategories and hoping to do so with best Seo practices in mind. When linking to a subcategory's main page, would I make the internal link www.xxx.com/fishing/ or www.xxx.com/fishing/index.html or does it matter? I'm just trying to avoid duplicate content I guess, if Google saw each page as a separate page. Any other cautions when using subdirectories in my navigation?
-
It seems like you are actually asking 2 questions in one. Let's approach them both separately.
Should you include index.html or not in your structure? Personally, I think the cleanest URL structure works the best. Get rid of any URL parameters that do not offer any benefit. Cleaner URLs not only look better, but are easier to read and share. Who really wants to share DOMAIN.com/fishing.index.html vs DOMAIN.com/fishing. It may seem petty, but in the grander scheme of things it will just work better. If you do this in one area of your site, keep it consistant through the whole site
As to making sure that Google only indexes one version, this can be done through the URL parameter redirects on your server. You can create rules where the URL automatically strips out any additional URL items, and redirects to the proper version. Once you create your sitemap, make sure to only include the versions of your URL you want indexed. One thing I have found in my entire SEO career is this: The easier and clearer you paint a picture for Google about your site, the better your results will be.
-
Hello,
Duplicate content is usually pretty simple to deal with see Sheena's response.
I would recommend at this point in design looking at the URL structure not primary as trying to avoid a negative, rather how to incorporate the most positives. That is how can you get the most SEO value out of the url's. Since you're at the point where you can make these changes, then now is the time to evaluate how you want your site to appear to the users and search engines.
Here are 2 Good, nay VERY GOOD post on Moz to help with this process.
1. Moz: Guide To SEO Chapter 4
2. Dr Pete: Anatomy Of A URLI hope this is helpful,
Don
-
First thing you need to do is determine which is your preferred URL (probably www.site.com/fishing/). Once you have that, the key to good linking is consistency (using the same, preferred URL for any given page you're linking to & also using descriptive, naturally-occurring anchor text that's relevant to the page's content).
The fact that your site has other versions of the page (/fishing/ and /fishing/index.html) means that you probably need to implement a solution to prevent dup content issues - either 301 redirect all variations to the preferred URL or implement rel=canonical tags to tell search bots which is the preferred URL to include in its index. You can read more about this here:
I hope this helps!
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
-
Link building with AddThis URL
We've begun using AddThis for tracking our social sharing. AddThis has been adding the snippet to the end of the URLs on our pages and we've been finding that people linking to us are linking to the URL with the snippet. AddThis says this isn't a problem for SEO. Is this correct? Here is an example: https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/how-to-start-a-non-profit-organization-in-colorado.php#.UunCfPldVig I want to make sure this is not affecting our SEO in any way, particularly that Google would see this as an affiliate or paid link since it has the "#". I may be crazy but I just want to make sure!
Technical SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
Hot Linking
We recently noticed that our website www.efurniturehouse.com is being hot linked by axsoris.com a Dutch website with many malware issue. Any suggestions how to proceed? Thanks in advance Tony
Technical SEO | | OCFurniture1 -
Link from Blogspot.com subdomain...
I have found an author that has an article about a particular product we sell online. I was thinking of speaking to them about getting a link to our site. But then I looked at the stats: <label>Page:</label><label id="Page Authority" class="key lsdata">PA:1</label><label id="mozrank" class="key lsdata" title="MozRank">mR:0.00</label>mT:0.00<label id="SEOmoz-data-uid">0</label> links from
Technical SEO | | bjs2010
<label id="SEOmoz-data-uipl">0</label> Root Domains<label>Root Domain:</label>**<label id="dom-pageauthority" class="key lsdata" title="Domain Authority">DA: 59</label>**24,797,212 links from
<label id="SEOmoz-data-pid">110,858</label> Domains<label>Subdomain:</label>Its on a subdomain of blogspot.com - and the page is relevant to a particular category and our e-commerce site.Is it worth pursuing the link?Thanks!0 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
How to find an internal link that is generating a duplicate
Hello Mozers Can anybody help me. It's a bit OCD, but, I really want to find the internal links within a clients site that are generating duplicate urls. I did start looking page by page using search, but got a bit stir crazy! I'm sure one of you smart SEO's will have a simple, clever solution:) Thanks Catherine
Technical SEO | | catherine-2793880 -
4XX Broken Links
I am attempting to fix the issues SEOmoz found when crawling my site. I have a list of 4XX errors that I am attempting to fix. Basically I know one option is to redirect them to another page, but I would like to have the option to remove the links completely. The only problem is I can not find where the links are located. Does SEOmoz provide where on my site these broken links are? Or do they only provide the url that is linked to?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
.Nofollow and link count
If i use nofollow on links ( internal or external ), will it reduce the link count as regard to Google. If there are 50 external links, and i nofollow 20 of them, will Google count this as 30 external links.
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Javascript funtion as link? Why not show up?
We joined our Chamber of Commerce for the "link" as much as anything. After 9 months of having a link from our local chamber it has never showed up anywhere. You can see the link on my Chambers page, and you can click on it and it works. But it does not show up anywhere else....Not in any backlink checker, not in SEOmoz, not in Google Webmaster Tools. When I hover over our link on their page I see "javascript:encodeclick........my url" Is this link worth anything? What is a javascriptencodeclick? Does Google know it exists and give me credit for it? Our Chamber is clueless... they hire someone to do their website. Their webmasters response to my question was: Hi, These links look like this because this is just the way our system parses URLs that are entered into the membership directory so they can be clickable when displayed in the lister. These links will not have a negative effect on Google or SEO indexing purposes if that is what you are concerned about. They are not encoded or encrypted, this just happens to be the name of the Javascript function.
Technical SEO | | SCyardman0