Why does SEOmoz use /blog/content-title vs /category/content-title? Any difference?
-
Assume a brand new blog being designed and all other things equal.
What are the pros & cons between using the url structure /blog/content-title vs. /category/content-title?
Note:
Both scenarios would be using categorical archiving. -
In my experience with content management solutions, it's easier (and thus more common) to keep all blog posts under the blog directory, then use categories in the URL and/or the Title tag (if necessary at all).
That said, most of the time I find categories to be more useful for users, and less helpful for engines.
So, to me the pros of using /category/content-title would only apply if the categories are very straightforward and short (which depends on your industry).
For example, if you run a outdoor hobbies blog, and you have clear, distinct categories like backpacking, camping, hiking, fishing, and so on, then using the category URL structure would be great.
However, if your blog is more specific (say backpacking only), your categories will start to become more convoluted and long, taking up a large part of the URL.
In addition, this can cause unnecessary redundancy in your URLs, which can appear like keyword stuffing.
Overall, I prefer to stick with /blog/content-title, and possibly include the category in the title tag if it's really important.
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
-
Duplicate content in sidebar
Hi guys. So I have a few sentences (about 50 words) of duplicate content across all pages of my website (this is a repeatable text in sidebar). Each page of my website contains about 1300 words (unique content) in total, and 50 words of duplicate content in sidebar. Does having a duplicate content of this length in sidebar affect the rankings of my website in any way? Thank you so much for your replies.
On-Page Optimization | | AslanBarselinov1 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
What word should I use in my URL for my blog
Should I use the word "blog" in my sub folder as in : http://www.mybusiness.com/blog or should I use http://www.mybusiness.com/news. Is there a difference for when my site is crawled. I understand that a blog works a little differently. Can someone explain the basics?
On-Page Optimization | | graemesanderson0 -
Duplicate Content aka 301 redirect from .com to .com/index.html
Moz reports are telling me that I have duplicate content on the home page because .com and .com/index.html are being seen as two pages. I have implemented 301 redirect using various codes I found online, but nothing seems to work. Currently I'm using this code. RewriteEngine On
On-Page Optimization | | omakad
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^jacksonvilleacservice.com
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ [L,R=301] Nothing is changing. What am I doing wrong? I have given it several weeks but report stays the same. Also according to webmasters tools they can't see this as duplicate content. What am I doing wrong?0 -
Titles
Our site http://villasdini.com is offering beach villas on sunny Diani beach in Kenya. I have a category with beach villas in Diani beach which I want to be shown in serp if somebody search for Diani beach villas, or Diani beach hotels, Diani beach accommodation etc. I have also category with small boutique hotels, which I want to be shown in serp if somebody search for Diani beach villas, or Diani beach hotels, Diani beach accommodation etc. Should I also include Diani beach in titles? Will that not be too much of Diani bech in titles? I am afraid I have anyway already too much of "Diani beach" keyword and perhaps I am even punished for it as I can't rank for this keyword at all almost a year:-( I also want to rank on Diani beach itself and I have created Diani beach page which I want to be shown in serp when somebody search for Diani beach. I am kind of getting crazy of this:-( Any advice what I am doing wrong and what strategy I should rather do? Thank you very much, Iris
On-Page Optimization | | Rebeca10 -
Photo Gallery with Duplicate Content and Titles
I have a photo Gallery that is coming up as a lot of Duplicate Titles and Page Content and fixing each photo just isn't possible right now. Should I just block the search engines from indexing them to resolve the errors?
On-Page Optimization | | NeilBelliveau0 -
Summarize your question.Images being seen as duplicate content/pages
My images suddenly are appearing in my crawl reports as duplicate content, without meta tags, this happened over night and cant figure out why.
On-Page Optimization | | RBYoung0 -
Category Pages with Sub-Categories
The image will explain it all... Each category page starts on the subject of the first sub-category page. This happens twice (well actually 3 times since this section of the site is called showroom and it starts on the tab mowers). Is this a terrible approach? If so, how could a site like this be better navigation-ally organized. cat-subcat.png
On-Page Optimization | | drewschmaltz0