Help me choose a new URL structure
-
Good morning SEOMoz. I have a huge website, with hundreds of thousands of pages.
The websites theme is mobile phone downloads. I want to create a better URL structure.
Currently an example url is /wallpaper/htc-wildfire-wallpapers.html
My issue with this, first and foremost is it's a little spammy, for example the fact it's in a wallpaper folder, means I shouldn't really need to be explicit with the filename, as it's implied.
Another issue arises with the download page. For example /wallpaper/1234/file-name-mobile-wallpaper.html
Again it's spammy but also the file ID, is at folder level, rather than within the filename. Making the file deeper and loses structure.
I am considering creating sub domains, based on model, to ensure a really tight silo. i.e htc.domain.com/wallpaper/wildfire/ and the download page would be htc.domain.com/wallpaper/file-name-id/
But due to restrictions with the CMS, this would involve a lot of work and so I am considering just cleaning up the url structure without sub domains.
/wallpaper/htc/wildfire/ and the download page would be /wallpaper/file-name-id/
What are your thoughts?
Somebody suggested having the downloads in no folder at all, but surely it makes sense for a wallpaper, to be in a wallpaper folder and an app to be in an app folder? If they were not in a folder, I'd need to be more explicit in the naming of the files.
Any advice would be awesome.
-
This is not an SEO question per se, it is really a business question. How do you need to organize your wallpapers to give you the information you need with your business.
Depending on how you generate your revenue you may want to organize by type of phone, etc. Tools like Google Analytics will sort things by folder and so if you build in a logical structure for your business model, you can then use the insights to help your business.
Example, if you were paid depending on the type of theme, then you would need to organize around themes. If you simply wanted to see what themes as a group were the most popular, then organize by themes. Lots of things to consider. How do your users think about browsing wallpapers? Setup your directories so that it makes sense to them when they are browsing your site or looking at your URL in the SERPs.
That said, I would organize by folder. Helps when you need to analyze traffic to the site if things are in logical organized folders. Also makes it easy to group.
Good luck!
-
Why not organize by phone type?
So domain.com/htc/wallpaper/1243/file.html
When you optimize for humans, the keywords and url structures makes more sense.
If I were to search for an iphone wallpaper it would be just that iphone > wallpaper, not wallpaper iphone. Or maybe walpaper for iphone, but let's not get technical.. hehe.
And depeding on site structure you could use the /file.hmtl page as the canonical of the download page.
I wouldn't go the route of subdomains.
Good luck, Cyril
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
-
Consolidate URLs on Wordpress?
Hi Guys, On a WordPress site, we are working with currently has multiple different versions of each URL per page. See screenshot: https://d.pr/i/ZC8bZt Data example: https://tinyurl.com/y8suzh6c Right now the non-https version redirects to the equivalent https versions while some of the https versions don't redirect and are status code 200. We all want all of them to redirect to the highlighted blue version (row a).Is this easily doable in wordpress and how would one go about it? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickstar1 -
SEO issues? New functionality added to website and now hash (in URL) - fragments
Hi All! We have new nice functionality on website, but now i doubt if we will have SEO issues. Duplicate content and if google is able to spider our website. See: http://www.allesvoorbbq.nl/boretti-da-vinci-nero.html#608=1370
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetailClicks
With the new functionality we can switch between colors of the models (black / white / red / yellow).
When you switch with Ajax the content of other models is fetched without refreshing the page. (so the url initial part of url stays the same (for initial model) only part behind # changes. The other models are also accessible by there own url, like the red one: http://www.allesvoorbbq.nl/boretti-da-vinci-rosso.html#608=1372 So far so good. But now the questions: 1. We use to have url like /boretti-da-vinci-nero.html - also our canonical is that way But now if we access that url our system is adding automatically the #123-123 to the url to indicate which model(color) is shown. Is this hurting SEO or confusing google? Because it seems that the clean url is not accessible anymore? (it adds now #123-123) 2. Should we add some tags around the different types (colors) to prevent google from indexing that part of website? Every info would be very helpfull! We do not want to lose our nice rankings thanks to MOZ! Thanks all!
Jeroen0 -
Weird 404 URL Problem - domain name being placed at end of urls
Hey there. For some reason when doing crawl tests I'm finding pages with the domain name being tacked on the end and causing 404 errors.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay328
For example: http://domainname.com/page-name/http://domainname.com This is happening to all pages, posts and even category type 1. Site is in Wordpress
2. Using Yoast SEO plugin Any suggestions? Thanks!0 -
Doubts with URL's structure
Hi guys i have some doubts with the correct URL structure for a new site. The question is about how show the city, the district and also the filters. I would do that: www.domain.com/category/city/disctict but maybe is better do that: **www.domain.com/category/city-district ** I also have 3 filters that are "individual/colective" "indoor/outdoor" and "young/adult" but that are not really interesting for the querys so where and how i put this filtters? At the end of the url showing these: **www.domain.com/cateogry/city/district#adult#outdoor#colective ** ? Well really i don't know what to do with the filters. Check if you could help me with that please. I also have a lof of interest in knowing if maybe is better use this combination **www.domain.com/category-city or domain.com/category/city **and know about the diference. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | omarmoscatt0 -
Wordpress Permalink Structure
A quick Wordpress Permalink checkup... I'm generally a fan of %postname% Permalink structure in Wordpress - although this does create a completely flat architecture, so that ALL Pages AND Posts are found at www.domain.com/_________ I'm sure I've heard, read, or ingested somewhere that it makes more sense to use /blog/%postname% which then makes all Blog Posts reside at www.domain.com/blog/________ with the static Page content still being at www.domain.com/________ Any thoughts to why this would NOT be a good idea? To me this seems more logical.. and like I say I'm sure I've heard an authority say Google kind of prefers that it can differentiate Blog content from everything else. I've used this successfully on a few sites so far, and all seems to be good. (Moz although not Wordpress, uses this structure for it's blog). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregDixson0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Best way to help a city-centric service provider market in new nearby territories?
Our client recently acquired new county territories outside the main area city. We could create separate location pages under the primary domain, but are wondering if micro sites with unique content (and location-including url) that links back to the location pages would also be a good idea. There is some traction for certain location-based keywords in those areas. Better to focus on the one domain, or augment with separate websites in different parts of the state? I can come up with plausible reasons for and against either, but would love your thoughts. Thank you for any insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PerfectPitchConcepts0 -
URL for offline purposes
Hi there, We are going to be promoting one of our products offline, however I do not want to use the original URL for this product page as it's long for the user to type in, so I thought it would be best practice in using a URL that would be short, easier for the consumer to remember. My plan: Replicate the product page and put it on this new short URL, however this would mean I have a duplicate content issue, would It be best practice to use a canonical on the new short URL pointing to the original URL? or use a 301? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780