Need Advice on Categorizing Posts, Using Topics, Site Navigation & Structure
-
Hey there,
My site had terrible categorization.
I did a redesign, and essentially decided to start over using Topics instead of categories - which appear as my site's main navigation. Now I need to assign a Topic to all my posts.
Is it safe to assign posts to multiple parent Topics from an SEO point of view? I want to do it since it would be helpful for users to find them in multiple locations some of the time, but I certainly don't want any SEO issues.
Also, should I de-categorize all of my posts since I'm assigning them to my new hierarchical taxonomy - Topics?
This is very important to finalize. Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
- Mike
-
It sounds as though you should be OK in that case - if they are all site.com/post, then it shouldn't matter how many categories they are in.
In theory you can have Topics and Categories - it all depends on how the site is set up, but I would probably say it's best to focus your efforts on one if I had to guess without knowing the site and all the considerations inside out.
Good luck.
-
Hey!
Thanks for your insight Will.
1. So, all my post URLs are straight off the root domain, i.e. site.com/post, but my developer says we are using a hierarchical taxonomy.
The URL's would remain the same whether appearing in 1 or several parent categories from the user-point-of-view.
I can't draw conclusions here as I'm not well-versed enough, but am trying to provide more information.
2. In addition to the multiple-topic-assigning issue, I'm also not sure if I should be de-categorizing my posts since I'm using Topics as my new hierarchical taxonomy.
Or maybe I should just scratch Topics since I haven't even delved deep into them yet and just work with my current sub-par categories and expand on that.
So confused.
Thank you!!!!!!!!!!
- Mike
-
Hi there,
The answer to this depends a little bit on how your CMS / website treats content that appears in multiple categories. The "correct" way of it working is that those pages are still accessible at only one URL (i.e. not at both /category1/slug and /category2/slug ). This is normally achieved either by having a primary category that appears in the URL (and then having that content also appear on the category2 page but not with category2 in the URL) or by having the content available at /slug and appearing on both category1 and category2 pages.
Assuming this is the case, then it's perfectly safe to have content appear in more than one category.
If not, you could investigate whether you can add a rel=canonical link from secondary categories to the primary category. This would be OK but you might want to limit it only to times when content really needs to be in both categories otherwise you may waste crawl budget depending on the scale of your site.
I actually wrote a post about the difference between URL structure and site architecture that you might find useful.
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
-
Need better solution for 301s with Jekyll/S3 Site
Hey Mozzers, So, this isn't the first time that I've come to the community with questions regarding my new site. Although running a site using static HTML-generated pages has been fantastic in the first few weeks as far as load times, it's been a nightmare in terms of a few other SEO-related concerns, namely redirects. In the Q&A post above, Mat Shepherd pointed out a solution for adding 301s to an Amazon Webservices site using their "Redirection Rules" field on the "Configure Bucket for Website Hosting" page. However, I discovered soon after that I was limited to only 50 redirects using this method. Obviously, all things considered, this will not be enough. At this point, I'm basically out of ideas. If anyone else out there has a website with a similar setup, (Jekyll platform hosted on Amazon S3,) that has overcome this problem with redirects, I'd really appreciate hearing from you. Thanks in advance, everyone
Technical SEO | | danny.wood0 -
Need Urgent Help
I have found one mistake that my place page address is little different than address on all local directories like on place page address is: 10010 S Tryon St #122 Charlotte, NC 28273 and on directories : 10010 South Tryon St 122 Charlotte, NC 28273 so on place page it is just "S" instead of South and "#" is before 122 but on all directories # is missing So what do you suggest ? Should i change address and re verify place page ? Re verify will put down place page value ???
Technical SEO | | mnkpso0 -
When to use canonical urls
I will be the first to admit I am never really 100% sure when to use canonical urls. I have a quick question and I am not really sure if this is a situation for a canonical or not. I am looking at a my friends building website and there are issues with what pages are ranking. Basically there homepage is focusing on the building refurbishment location but for some reason in internal page is ranking for that keyword and it is not mentioned at all on that page. Would this be a time to add the homepage url and a canonical on the ranking page (using yoast plugin) to tell Google that the homepage is the preferred page? Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | propertyhunter0 -
Need help with home page on site
Hello! Thanks for reading in advance! I've got a relatively old site (12 year old domain) that has experienced a drop in rankings specifically for our home page. Some of the key terms that I'd assume we would rank well for are: "expedite us passport" According to SEOMOZ, our on page optimization receives a C for the termr. also, the root domain and page have decent links, etc. However; looking at Google (logged out and in incognito mode in chrome), a page on our site http://www.passportsandvisas.com/passport/index.asp ranks well and our HOME page isn't listed in the top 50 or 100. THis is the case for a lot of keywords we used to rank well for. I would have thought our home page would have at least outranked an internal page. Any thoughts would be very, very helpful!
Technical SEO | | santiago230 -
Does anyone use Ning (Custom social site)?
We just got a custom Ning site developed and the second we moved it to our domain, we lost almost all of our rankings in Google. So, we sign up for a SEOMoz Pro account and within a week we see that we have over 6,000 errors and warnings on our site. Duplicate content, duplicate page titles and pages with too many links. Is anyone using Ning and successfully maintaining 1st page rankings in Google? Seems to me that we need hundreds of fixes and modifications in the code of our site to fix all of these errors and get Google to take our penalizations off.
Technical SEO | | danlok0 -
Mobile site rank on Google S.E. instead of desktop site.
Hello, all SEOers~ Today, I would like to hear your opinion regarding on Mobile site and duplicate contents issue. I have a mobile version of our website that is hosted on a subdomain (m instead www). Site is targeting UK and Its essentially the same content, formatted differently. So every URL on www exists also at the "m" subdomain and is identical content. (there are some different contents, yet I could say about 90% or more contents are same) Recently I've noticed that search results are showing links to our mobile site instead of the desktop site. (Google UK) I have a sitemap.xml for both sites, the mobile sitemap defined as follows: I didn't block googlebot from mobile site and also didn't block googlebot-mobile from desktop site. I read and watched Google webmaster tool forum and related video from Matt Cutts. I found many opinion that there is possibility which cause duplicate contents issue and I should do one of followings. 1. Block googlebot from mobile site. 2. Use canonical Tag on mobile site which points to desktop site. 3. Create and develop different contents (needless to say...) Do you think duplicate contents issue caused my mobile site rank on S.E. instead of my desktop site? also Do you think those method will help to show my desktop site on S.E.? I was wondering that I have multi-country sites which is same site format as I mentioned above. However, my other country sites are totally doing fine on Google. Only difference that I found is my other country sites have different Title & Meta Tag comparing to desktop site, but my UK mobile site has same Title & Meta Tag comparing to desktop. Do you think this also has something to do with current problem? Please people~! Feel free to make some comments and share your opinion. Thanks for reading my long long explanation.
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
Site command
How reliable is site command? Is there any other way to check indexed pages.
Technical SEO | | gmk15670