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URL Length or Exact Breadcrumb Navigation URL? What's More Important
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Basically my question is as follows, what's better:
www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs).
or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain).
In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same.
To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure?
Please advise,
Shawn
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The question is a great one, and the responses to it are also great, but they directly contradict each other! Could the SEOMoz staff weigh in on this one?
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Shwan,
I have noticed that when you have a long URL structure with multiple folders, Google tends to lose "interest" in your deep pages.
Let me give you an example: If you have a domain called www.website.com and you have a category called gemstones. In gemstones, you have diamond as a subcategory and a solitaire as a page.
If you consider your homepage to have an importance of 1, you would not have a category page which also has an importance of greater than or equal to 1. So, your category page gets a page weight value...lets say 0.9. Now, your subcategory page is treated that same way and you give it a page weight of say 0.8. Now, your solitaire page gets a value less than 0.8. Now, if you cut out one or more levels in your URL, you have a better chance of assigning of a higher value to your page.
Now, coming to your question. Breadcrumbs are essentially meant to help your users navigate better. So, your website hiearchy (the folders, sub folders or categories, sub categories) should reflect in your breadcrumb.
So, keep your URLs short, but keep your breadcrumbs like your website flow.
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In my experience, Google does not ranking lower longer URLs. I know Rand published once a correlation study that shows this, but I can show you many examples that I've used the first approach and got good rankings. Same for the second approach.
I think you should keep your website architecture solid, following the correct path and not removing one level.
Another thing is that dropping that specific level may cause you some duplicate URLs problem. You will need some database check before enable each URLs. Pay attention if you choose the second approach.
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The url
length should not be ridiculously long, I think 255 chars in the safe limit.So long as
you keep in that it’s ok, but if you have a long bread crumb trail, your page
is probably many clicks from the home page also and this is bad.Many people
think that the problem is having pages deep in the folder structure, but it is
not, it is the amount of clicks from the home page that is the problem
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Two Pages with the Same Name Different URL's
I was hoping someone could give me some insight into a perplexing issue that I am having with my website. I run an 20K product ecommerce website and I am finding it necessary to have two pages for my content: 1 for content category pages about wigets one for shop pages for wigets 1st page would be .com/shop/wiget/ 2nd page would be .com/content/wiget/ The 1st page would be a catalogue of all the products with filters for the customer to narrow down wigets. So ultimately the URL for the shop page could look like this when the customer filters down... .com/shop/wiget/color/shape/ The second page would be content all about the Wigets. This would be types of wigets colors of wigets, how wigets are used, links to articles about wigets etc. Here are my questions. 1. Is it bad to have two pages about wigets on the site, one for shopping and one for information. The issue here is when I combine my content wiget with my shop wiget page, no one buys anything. But I want to be able to provide Google the best experience for rankings. What is the best approach for Google and the customer? 2. Should I rel canonical all of my .com/shop/wiget/ + .com/wiget/color/ etc. pages to the .com/content/wiget/ page? Or, Should I be canonicalizing all of my .com/shop/wiget/color/etc pages to .com/shop/wiget/ page? 3. Ranking issues. As it is right now, I rank #1 for wiget color. This page on my site would be .com/shop/wiget/color/ . If I rel canonicalize all of my pages to .com/content/wiget/ I am going to loose my rankings because all of my shop/wiget/xxx/xxx/ pages will then point to .com/content/wiget/ page. I am just finding with these massive ecommerce sites that there is WAY to much potential for duplicate content, not enough room to allow Google the ability to rank long tail phrases all the while making it completely complicated to offer people pages that promote buying. As I said before, when I combine my content + shop pages together into one page, my sales hit the floor (like 0 - 15 dollars a day), when i just make a shop page my sales are like (1k+ a day). But I have noticed that ever since Penguin and Panda my rankings have fallen from #1 across the board to #15 and lower for a lot of my phrase with the exception of the one mentioned above. This is why I want to make an information page about wigets and a shop page for people to buy wigets. Please advise if you would. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!
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