Directory site with an URL structure dilemma
-
Hello,
We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp).
Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages.
While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’.
One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest.
I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant.
My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them.
My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content.
With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts.
This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely.
Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way?
Many thanks,
Andras
-
You're welcome. As you might have guessed, I've tackled this problem myself a few times!!
-
Ok, this is something I can take as homework.
Thank you for having checked my issue in details.
-
It's painful, but that is your answer:
Q. Why isn't google ranking these pages better?
A. Because they are not unique or usefulGoogle can be annoyingly smart like that. The cheapest/easiest fix is probably to have a paragraph added to the top of each page. So your /budapest/jatekbolt page would have a paragraph about the wonderful choice of restaurants available in budapest and it's rich culinary heritage. (queue affordably copywriter to help keep them different).
You could also consider adding a field to your business database for "recommended snippet" which if filled in highlights that listing and gives a more in depth amount of information. You could the have someone look at reviews for the listings in key categories, pick our favourites and write a fresh description to those featured businesses.
The result of that will be a page that has more unique content and is in fact slightly more useful, That puts you in good standing for improved rankings.
-
Your assumption is correct about the snippets.
We either use part of the business description or some of the actual review wording on the category pages.
While I understand the importance of your suggestion, that is all I have about these businesses, and I add these snippets to the lists, so that I could increase CTR through previews.
Yes, there is no original content, basically just 'copied contents' from several pages, so the category page is total duplicate to nothing, but not genuine either.
Thank you again for your help.
-
Actually, I would say that uniqueness probably is an issue. keep in mind that I don't speak Hungarian,but it looks like everything on that page is a snippet from the sub pages. ie none of the text on that page is unique to that page. Is that correct?
Adding unique content at category level, even just a few lines of natural text that include the main keywords can make quite a difference. I've found it much harder to rank category pages that do not have that.
That would probably be my first job. Even if you just did it on a sample set of pages and monitored those for any improvement. Making them useful (and therefore attracting links) might be harder.
-
My guess would be that the bigger problem is not the URL structure, but the content on those category pages. The change you propose to the URL structure is good in terms of helping the business listing pages and in creating a logical hierarchy, but it isn't going to help those category pages.
I'd start with looking at:
- Content of the category pages : Do they have unique content. Is that content useful in it's own terms?
- Internal linking of category pages : Are you linking back up to the categories from the businesses, are you linking down to them ok. Are those links close to the top of the site hierarchy?
- External links: Are you getting links from other websites to those pages (easier if they are useful)
- On page optimisation: Are the category pages themselves well optimised
I'd question whether there is any benefit at all to your category pages in changing the URL structure of your business pages. However if there is some it's impact will pale to nothing compared to the above.
-
Thank you for your reply.
Your suggestion matches the actual way of how we handle the issue right now.
I have thought, that we might be able to improve the process a bit, but I am happy, that there is no need to change the way of how it works now.
-
Ok, when the question starts it sounds real easy to me but down the question it become too complex that it makes me confused on how to answer...
For Business listing I think it’s best to go with http://www.example.com/biz/my-business-name
For category pages the URL should be like http://www.example.com/oh/car-parts (oh represents the city name while car parts in the category)
All categories should come in all states for example if a person in California looks for car parts the url should be http://www.example.com/ca/car-parts
Reason why you should adopt this structure...
- Duplicate content issue will be eliminated
- URLs will not be so long so there will be no indexing issues
- Even if a business selects the multiple categories the content will not be duplicated.
Hope this helps...
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
-
Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site:
Website: www.gobol.in Although I have no indexed my search pages by adding /catalogsearch in robots.txt, still we are getting same error again and again Here's a list of sample URLs with potential problems. http://www.gobol.in/catalogsearch/result/index/?category=&mobile_feature=4575_4578&q=panasonic+NR-BU303LH1H+REFRIGERATOR+296+L+GREY&special_price=32%2C456&x=0&y=0 http://www.gobol.in/mobile-and-accessories/mobiles-and-brands.html?manufacturer=4753_3355_455_4435_4720_3407_2412_4728_4784_4790_2010_4789_4376_2469&operating_system_mobile=4612 Please help
On-Page Optimization | | Obbserv0 -
Tips for Getting a Very Small Site to Rank
I am working on a very small (two page) site for a client, and trying to rank for some very competitive local terms. The site is www.arlingtonbuilders.com, and our terms center around local cities (like Arlington) plus "custom homes," "custom renovations," etc. I feel very limited in terms of what I can do on the site, and I'm building citations offsite, but I feel stuck. I'd love some tips for helping them rank better without building out an entire site.
On-Page Optimization | | ScottImageWorks3 -
Site Not Ranking for Key Term
Question for my fellow Mozers I have a ranking question that I cannot put my finger on. I have a site (visitplano.com) where the client wants to rank for the keyword "Plano". I can't say if the site was previously ranking for this keyword, but I looked into the basic SEO practices and found that the keyword is incorporated in: Domain Title Content There is a lack of internal linking and anchor text within the content External links - 1,558 DA - 46 PA - 55 Currently, the website does not rank for the keyword "Plano". Could someone shed some light on why they aren't ranking or what I may be missing? I would greatly appreciate your help.
On-Page Optimization | | flcity150 -
Blog URL
I know that this question has been asked in the past, and that website.com/blog is better for seo purposes than blog.website.com. We want to setup a custom blog on our site, using Wordpress. Our designers/host are telling us that buy using website.com/blog can causes issues b/c Wordpress is open source, and our site could be hacked? Is there anything we should do about this? Any suggestions? Any Advice appreciated!!! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | TP_Marketing0 -
Replacing "_" with "-" in url, results in new url?
We ran SEOmoz's "On-Page Optimization" tool on a url which contains the character "_". According to the tool: "Characters which are less commonly used in URLs may cause problems with accessibility, interpretation and ranking in search engines. It is considered a best practice to stick to standard URL structures to avoid potential problems." "Rewrite the URL to contain only standard characters." Therefore we will rewrite the url, replacing "_" with "-". Will search engines consider the "-" url a different one? Do we need to 301 the old url to the new one? Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH0 -
Meta refresh - nojavascript url
seomox is telling me that I am getting a page that is not being indexed or crawled and since the crawl status code is 200 and there are no robots the meta-refresh url must be the problem. the meta refresh url is different than the on page report card url as it's the nojavascript url which my developer says should be ok. see his comments below. The is redirecting to http://mastermindtoys.com/store/nojavascript.html only in case if the JavaScript is disabled in the client browser. This is the right way to do it, I don’t understand why this might be a problem, otherwise MM has to implement Noscript pages that have a real content. I didn’t get what’s wrong about accessibility. The code 200 means it is accessible, and yes there is nothing to access if JavaScript is disabled on browser. I think there are no modern retail sites that would do any sensible business with the scripting disabled in browsers.The H1 is really present 2 times and second occurrence can be removed, though I highly doubt about importance of this change.Regarding duplicates – what URLs are considered duplicates? Can you please send me examples?I am not aware of canonical URL problem for MM site unless we consider old .asp links as duplicate links of the canonical product pages. I would appreciate if SEOMoz gave us an example what they mean.I suspect that the page is not getting indexed as a result of this or I'm just not getting a good score. Which is it?
On-Page Optimization | | mastermindtoys0 -
Site-wide keyword density
A colleague of mine was saying that he has been able to get top ranking for a high traffic term by using variations of that head term on multiple pages that are associated with the main page. For example,he would optimize a landing page for the high traffic word "Construction." He would then build pages under this landing page that are optimized for variations of this word: "Construction facts," "Industrial Construction Companies," "Construction Resource Allocator" etc. His theory is that the subpages add credibility with spiders that the root page is the best for that root page. This doesn't seem like it would work, but I'm curious as to what other people think.
On-Page Optimization | | EricVallee340 -
All Caps in URL
Hello, we're working with a corporate client to make changes to their URL structure. We recommended that they use a structure like "domain.com/state/city/location". Their IT department is on board, but they just mentioned that all of the state and city info will be pulled from a database where it is all caps. So it would be like this "domain.com/STATE/CITY/location" I'm concerned that it may be spammy, but I can't find any definitive information online. We usually like to test issues like this on our own sites before advising clients, but we're working up against a quick deadline. Any help with this issue would be great, especially real world experience, not just theories. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | interactivek0