Could this URL issue be affecting our rankings?
-
Hi everyone,
I have been building links to a site for a while now and we're struggling to get page 1 results for their desired keywords. We're wondering if a web development / URL structure issue could be to blame in what's holding it back.
The way the site's been built means that there's a 'false' 1st-level in the URL structure. We're building deeplinks to the following page:
www.example.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-overview
However, if you chop off the 2nd-level, you're not given a category page, it's a 404:
www.example.com/blue-widgets/ - [Brings up a 404]
I'm assuming the web developer built the site and URL structure this way just for the purposes of getting additional keywords in the URL. What's worse is that there is very little consistency across other products/services. Other pages/URLs include:
www.example.com/green-widgets/widgets-in-green
www.example.com/red-widgets/red-widget-intro-page
www.example.com/yellow-widgets/yellow-widgets
I'm wondering if Google is aware of these 'false' pages* and if so, if we should advise the client to change the URLs and therefore the URL structure of the website.
- This is bearing in mind that these pages haven't been linked to (because they don't exist) and therefore aren't being indexed by Google. I'm just wondering if Google can determine good/bad URL etiquette based on other parts of the URL, i.e. the fact that that middle bit doesn't exist.
As a matter of fact, my colleague Steve asked this question on a blog post that Dr. Pete had written. Here's a link to Steve's comment - there are 2 replies below, one of which argues that this has no implication whatsoever. However, 5 months on, it's still an issue for us so it has me wondering...
Many thanks!
-
It's ahrd to address in blog comments, but these things can be very situational. In a perfect world, I don't like those phantom folder levels for 2 reasons:
(1) Someone will eventually try to link to or access one, including possibly Google, and that may lead to odd behavior. I've seen claims Google will extrapolate URLs, but have never seen clear proof.
(2) It just makes for long URLs that, in this case, look a bit spammy.
Practically, is it making a difference? They aren't being indexed, so that's certainly a positive sign - it indicates no weird extrapolation by Google and no inbound links to those levels. At the same time, as discussed in my post, revamping your entire URL structure does carry risk.
So, it's not ideal (IMO), but I'm not sure I'd mess with it unless you're changing URLs for other reasons (then, do it all at once).
-
URLs - headache! We have a terrible URL structure because of the ways we have to pull data, so this is something that I have checked into, too. Now, I will say there's lots of differing opinions on this. I will share with you what someone from Google said last week at SMXWest: they just want you to know about bad links, they don't penalize you for them.
I'm not saying that's the end-all-be-all answer, but she knows that there's a perception that it can 'ding' you when the reality (according to her) is that they drop 404 pages from their index because they don't serve up bad pages. You have lots of bad pages, less linking ability, less pages to have rank and you can lose online visibility. There's a difference between losing visibility because your overall content offering is reduced by bad links and those pages never having existed in the first place.
There's a good chance there's something else going on -one of the things I adore about this forum is that people here have crazy skills and I have witnessed them uncover an issue the original poster didn't even know they had.
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
-
Keywords in URL
I have an ecommerce store and i am using moz to get it into the best seo situation... my question is this..... I want to know how important it is to have the targeted keyword actually in the product page url.... I working on meta title and description which is good, but if i start changing all my product urls, it has major impact on the work i have to do since i would have to redo all my product links in ads, and all my product urls in emails, etc. So how much of a part do the urls play in seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bkhoward20010 -
Panda, rankings and other non-sense issues
Hello everyone I have a problem here. My website has been hit by Panda several times in the past, the first time back in 2011 (first Panda ever) and then another couple of times since then, and, lastly, the last June 2016 (either Panda or Phantom, not clear yet). In other words, it looks like my website is very prone to "quality" updates by big G: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Still trying to understand how to get rid of Panda related issues once for all after so many years of tweaking and cleaning my website of possible duplicate or thin content (301 redirects, noindexed pages, canonicals, etc), and I have tried everything, believe me. You name it. We recovered several times though, but once in a while, we are still hit by that damn animal. It really looks like we are in the so called "grey" area of Panda, where we are "randomly" hit by it once in a while. Interestingly enough, some of our competitors live joyful lives, at the top of the rankings, without caring at all about Panda and such, and I can't really make a sense of it. Take for example this competitors of ours: http://8notes.com They have a much smaller catalog than ours, worse quality of offered music, thousands of duplicate pages, ads everywhere, and yet... they are able to rank 1st on the 1st page of Google for most of our keywords. And for most, I mean, 99.99% of them. Take for example "violin sheet music", "piano sheet music", "classical sheet music", "free sheet music", etc... they are always first. As I said, they have a much smaller website than ours, with a much smaller offering than ours, their content quality is questionable (not cured by professional musicians, and highly sloppy done content as well as design), and yet they have over 480,000 pages indexed on Google, mostly duplicate pages. They don't care about canonicals to avoid duplicate content, 301s, noindex, robot tags, etc, nor to add text or user reviews to avoid "thin content" penalties... they really don't care about anything of that, and yet, they rank 1st. So... to all the experts out there, my question is: Why's that? What's the sense or the logic beyond that? And please, don't tell me they have a stronger domain authority, linking root domains, etc. because according to the duplicate and thin issues I see on that site, nothing can justify their positions in my opinion and, mostly, I can't find a reason why we instead are so much penalized by Panda and such kind of "quality" updates when they are released, whereas websites like that one (8notes.com) rank 1st making fun of all the mighty Panda all year around. Thoughts???!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?
Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first. I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs. For example website.com/category/sub-category.html Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/ We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings. By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category? Second question: If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case. For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category Duplicate content/pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Do low quality subdomains affect the ranking performance/quality of a root domain?
Hi, Late last year the company I work for launched two new websites that, at the time, we believed were completely separate from our main website. The two new websites were set up externally and were not well-planned from an SEO perspective (LOTS of duplicate content) - hence, they have struggled to rank on Google. Since the launch of the new websites we have also noticed that our main website (that previously ranked very well) has suffered a decline in visitation and search engine rank. We initially attributed this to a number of factors, including the state of the market, and ramped up our SEO efforts (seeing minor improvement). We have since realised that these two new websites have been set up as subdomains of our main website, with MOZ displaying the same domain authority and root domain backlink profile. My question is, do poor quality subdomains affect the ranking performance of a root domain? I have not yet managed to find a definitive answer. Please let me know if more information is required - I am quite new to the whole SEO concept. Thanks! Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulissai0 -
Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"
Greetings Moz Community: I purchased a SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit. The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly. My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors. So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the SEMrush audit. Thanks, Alan BarjWaO SqVXYMy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Rankings Dropped
Hello, I wonder if anyone can point us in the right direction. Our main domain name has got a good SEO profile the domain is 12 years old and we have some good reputable links. On the 7th of Jan our website dropped in the rankings from 3rd to 10th for one of our main keywords and from then onwards some of our other keywords have dropped. We have a lot of landing pages that target specific keywords which look like a template page but just with the content changed. Can anyone pin point what could of caused this problem or has anyone experienced this before and knows how to fix it. I personally think we have been hit by the panda. Thanks, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Page Authority Issue
My home page http://www.musicliveuk.com has a domain authority of 42 and page authority of 52. However I have set up other pages on the site to optimise for one keyword per page as I thought this was best practice. For example http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-bands targets 'wedding band' but this has a page authority of 24 way below my competitors. Having used the keyword difficulty tool on here it appears that is why I am struggling to rank highly (number 9). This is the same problem for several of my main keywords. I am building links to this and other pages in order to increase their authority and eventually rank highly but am I not better off optimising my home page that already has a good page authority and would probably out rank my competitors? Or am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Rel=Canonical URLs?
If I had two pages: PageA about Cats PageB about Dogs If PageA had a link rel=canonical to PageB, but the content is different, how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?" If PageA 301 redirected to PageB, (no content in PageA since it's 301 redirected), how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | visionnexus0