SEO problem if homepage is 2 folders deep?
-
We are currently looking at a site for a client, where instead of featuring standard file structure, every folder is being buried two folders deep by the CMS.
So the homepage is:
www.domain.com.au/folder/folder
And a subpage is:
www.domain.com.au/folder/folder/subpage
Is this necessarily and SEO problem? Will it be positive for rankings to pull out the two redundant folders?
Any insights are appreciated!
Cheers
-
I should point out that directory "level" in the URL is not the same as how deep a page is. If a page one-off the home-page is 4 directory levels deep, the crawlers still see it as one layer down, because that's how they reached it. I agree that this structure is far less than ideal, but I don't think it would automatically harm your internal PR flow.
-
It's not great. I find Google to be very stubborn about wanting to use the root level, and putting it 2 levels deep could cause some general crawl and canonicalization issues. Plus, Google may go looking for a folder or pages at the first level.
You're also adding duplicate keywords to every URL and pushing down the unique keywords. Even though keywords in the URL are a relatively weak ranking factor, it certainly isn't going to help you.
The risks may be small to moderate, but there's no up-side that I can see. Is this primarily a technical issue?
-
Hi Marketing Results, As we know that Search Engines measure the importance of a page's subject matter in part, by its proximity to the Homepage. Oftentimes content kept in directories that are more than 3 directories deep are considered of low value and will have difficulty ranking well for their topic.
From the SEO point of view it makes an impact . To see how it creates an impact please refer to this link:
http://searchengineland.com/supercharge-your-urls-for-maximum-seo-impact-14006
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
-
SEO URLs: 1\. URLs in my language (Greek, Greeklish or English)? 2\. Αt the end it is good to put -> .html? What is the best way to get great ranking?
Hello all, I must put URLs in my language Greek, Greeklish or in English? And at the end of url it is good to put -> .html? For exampe www.test.com/test/test-test.html ? What is the best way to get great ranking? I am a new digital marketing manager and its my first time who works with a programmer who doesn't know. I need to know as soon as possible, because they want to be "on air" tomorrow! Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Marios
Technical SEO | | marioskal0 -
Alt Tags - how important for SEO?
Hi I know alt tags should be on an image, however at the moment I have 23,741 missing on the site, how important are these? It's a big project for someone to update & I need some justification Thanks Mozzers 🙂
Technical SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Changing URLs for SEO
Hi, Currently we have a page, /business, but we have shifted our strategy to optimize for this page for the keyword "enterprise" instead of "business". The page authority of this page is 18 and our domain authority is 35. I've already updated content and title tags to more of an enterprise focus. Would it be wise to move the page to /enterprise and create a 301 redirect from /business to /enterprise? Or is this too risky from an SEO standpoint? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mikekeeper0 -
Url folder structure
I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature _
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes.
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.0 -
Problems with to many indexed pages
A client of our have not been able to rank very well the last few years. They are a big brand in our country, have more than 100+ offline stores and have plenty of inbound links. Our main issue has been that they have to many indexed pages. Before we started we they had around 750.000 pages in the Google index. After a bit of work we got it down to 400-450.000. During our latest push we used the robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" on all pages we wanted to get out of the index, along with canonical to correct URL - nothing was done to robots.txt to block the crawlers from entering the pages we wanted out. Our aim is to get it down to roughly 5000+ pages. They just passed 5000 products + 100 categories. I added this about 10 days ago, but nothing has happened yet. Is there anything I can to do speed up the process of getting all the pages out of index? The page is vita.no if you want to have a look!
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Canonical: Is this a problem?
Hi!!
Technical SEO | | petrospan
I am running a small wordpress website and i have a question because i am a litle confusic about Rel Canonical notices in the crawl diagnostics! I have the seo by yoast and i have fix all the canonical url for my page, but i take notices. I must worried about it or is something that inform me that everyting is ok? rel.jpg rel.jpg0 -
Are pagination a bad thing for seo
hi i am just checking my errors on my site and it is telling me about duplicate pagination results, so i am just wondering if pagination is bad for seo for example http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm/benidorm-news/Page-2 i also have page 3 and page 4. should i stop my site from having this to help with seo
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
SEO Developers
I have a team of inexperienced SEO developers and the argument we continually have is that its a marketing role - however most of it is technical, no view state, no js, page load time, csssprite, metatags, frequency of updates to server, duplicate content via coding methodology, lioading content prior to ads, not spidering ads (IT says impossible yet google says required) etc. I looked at your referrals for developers and couldnt find any that recognized SEO as part of their skill set - do you believe tehre aer developers that specialize in this? Thanks, Michelle
Technical SEO | | Silly8880