Category Base in Wordpress
-
I notice that there is a checkbox on the Yoast SEO Plugin for "strip category base". What is the reason to do this? What are the SEO advantages and disadvantages?
-
In WordPress, if you have categories of dogs, budgies and cats, the category pages that WordPress generates for you will be
So the word category appears in each URL diluting the keywords. Yoast allows you to remove the "category" part of this altogether, if you want to. I don't think there are any disadvantages to it other than when you look at a page URL you'll have a hard time telling if it is a category page or not.
The advantage is that you page doesn't look generated to the naked eye - the word category in the URL is giveaway. If you go to the trouble of inserting some relevant unique info at the top of each category page this will look even better, both to humans and search engines. You also make the URL a little more relevant.
You can instead specify a word to replace category and tag in the URL which is another route. So rather than category you can specify some niche word where appropriate.
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
-
Blog on Custom Website - WordPress Alternatives
Howdy folks. I'm trying to find any good alternative for adding CMS blog to custom website. Most people, us included, are using WP, but, as we know, it's really painful to work with, easily hackable etc etc. So, I wonder if anyone knows of a blog platform, which can be installed on our own websites for blogging, but without drawbacks of WordPress. Any nudge in correct direction will be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK1 -
Ecommerce: A product in multiple categories with a canonical to create a ‘cluster’ in one primary category Vs. a single listing at root level with dynamic breadcrumb.
OK – bear with me on this… I am working on some pretty large ecommerce websites (50,000 + products) where it is appropriate for some individual products to be placed within multiple categories / sub-categories. For example, a Red Polo T-shirt could be placed within: Men’s > T-shirts >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
Men’s > T-shirts > Red T-shirts
Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts
Men’s > Sale > T-shirts
Etc. We’re getting great organic results for our general T-shirt page (for example) by clustering creative content within its structure – Top 10 tips on wearing a t-shirt (obviously not, but you get the idea). My instinct tells me to replicate this with products too. So, of all the location mentioned above, make sure all polo shirts (no matter what colour) have a canonical set within Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts. The presumption is that this will help build the authority of the Polo T-shirts page – this obviously presumes “Polo Shirts” get more search volume than “Red T-shirts”. My presumption why this is the best option is because it is very difficult to manage, particularly with a large inventory. And, from experience, taking the time and being meticulous when it comes to SEO is the only way to achieve success. From an administration point of view, it is a lot easier to have all product URLs at the root level and develop a dynamic breadcrumb trail – so all roads can lead to that one instance of the product. There's No need for canonicals; no need for ecommerce managers to remember which primary category to assign product types to; keeping everything at root level also means there no reason to worry about redirects if product move from sub-category to sub-category etc. What do you think is the best approach? Do 1000s of canonicals and redirect look ‘messy’ to a search engine overtime? Any thoughts and insights greatly received.0 -
Wordpress site, MOZ showing missing meta description but pages do not exist on backend
I've got a wordpress website (a client) and MOZ keeps showing missing meta descriptions. When I look at the pages these are nonsense pages, they do exist somewhere but I am not seeing them on the backend. Questions: 1) how do I fix this? Maybe it's a rel con issue? why is this referring to "non-sense" pages? When I go to the page there is nothing on it except maybe an image or the headline, it's very strange. Any input out there I greatly appreciate. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SOM240 -
Anyone deal with WebSynthesis as a WordPress host?
Curious to get feedback from users who have used or are currently using WebSynthesis for their WordPress web hosting. I'm also open to hear about what you are doing if not using WebSynthesis, like WPEngine or GoDaddy's new Managed WP solution, etc. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Links from music/celebrity based fansites - sitewide images with no alt text
We're currently in the middle of a link audit on our website OneDirection.net and a large part of our incoming links come from fansites such as the following: ladygaganow.net nickjonline.com justinbieberhood.com joejonashq.com harrystylesfan.org brunodaily.org onedirectiondaily.com onedirectionfans.net Now, our previous way of thinking was that these are very relevant websites in the same niche as us, and therefore should be passing some value? However all of the links on these sites come from sitewide images with no alt-text. Some of the sites are passing 1000+ links to us. We've been wary to disavow or request removal of these links as we've usually gone with the thinking that Google applies "common-sense" based logic in its algorithms, and therefore these backlinks should be ok - in our opinion. However we think we are suffering from some kind of algorithmic penalty with our current rankings, and are now thinking these could be the cause. What are people's opinions on these links? Should we stay clear of sitewide links altogether? Should we contact the site owners and try to get them to mix up the alt-text? Or should we get rid of them altogether? Thanks, Chris.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PixelKicks0 -
Best way to duplicate a wordpress site for staging purposes?
I want to make some changes to my Wordpress site, and want to somehow set up a live staging area. Does anyone know of a good way to do this? I want all of the same content there I just want to be able to make changes to it and try it all out before going live. Any thoughts on this? Also I want to be sure the staging site doesn't get indexed since it will be a complete duplicate of my existing site. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Does Bing(and Yahoo)Crawl AJAX Based Content?
I found this article and Bing appeared to at this time have a checkbox for the option for AJAX handling although looking at the Bing Webmaster Tools it doesnt appear that this option is available. Has it just been completely integrated now, relieving webmaster from needing to check the option or is it no longer supported? http://searchengineland.com/bing-now-supports-googles-crawlable-ajax-standard-84149
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imiJoe0 -
Wordpress access denied
In Google Webmaster tools after doing a Google Fetch for our Blog which is showing Access Denied for 900+ pages this is the report that comes up and I wonder if this is causing the 900+ pages to show "Access Denied" and if so how to rectify it? The page seems to redirect to itself. This may result in an infinite redirect loop. Please check the Help Center article about redirects.```
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises
<code>HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/blog/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2012 07:04:05 GMT
Content-Length: 157 <title>Document Moved</title> Object Moved This document may be found here I</code>0