2 Question about URL structure
-
Hello guys
1 - I have a question about the best structure for URLs from the point of view of SEO:
Is it OK to use the URL as
mywebsite.com.br/long-tail-article
Or is better this
mywebsite.com.br/category/long-tail-article
2 - When part of my keyword is already in my "category", for example:
mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-is-good
I leave it as it is, or in the following way:
mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing-is-good
NOTE: Do not take into account that this URL would be different from other URLs in this category
-
'a user may remember a number easier than a url which is descriptive' - true. Tho, if you look at it from a search engine angle, CTR is a crucial factor - and even if the title of a page itself is a good discriminator, many people still do look at URLs.
Imagine a page title like 'We give away gold for free' and a URL path saying 'this-is-just-a-scam.html' . While this is an extreme example the analogy should hold up. And while 12345 probably does not mean anything negative to anyone (or only to very, very, very few people) it is not really meaningful.
Thus I don't agree with your premise and I'm with Heather when she's saying that your user should be the prime focus and her implication that Google's interest is in the user and will do what it takes to make them happy - and that's not just for commercial reasons.
I however completely am with you on your 'this depends on the size and nature of your site' comment!
General rule:
- keyword duplication is BAD: mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-is-good would very likely be considered as SPAM
- short title are preferred (as per early 2012 and I've not heard anything else about that since then) - as Michael said before
- targeted landing pages are GOOD. I'd say that if you plan to have the category in the URL just for the URL's purpose - leave it be. But if you plan on making e.g. - digital-marketing/index.html a targeted landing page with additional content (i.e. not just a plain listing of the articles) the you can gain real value
- try to make all pages reachable from the homepage within 4 clicks or less. Category offer you a perfect way to do this - on top of providing good landing pages
What I'd do:
1.) Check if you and/or your team has got the time to provide and maintain bespoke content for category pages, e.g. digital-marketing. If not, then I'd tend not to bother with changing the URLs
2.) If you decide you have the time - GO FOR IT. Check how many duplications you'd really have for each of your designated categories. Might be best to manually change the title and/or have a script check your database for such duplications.Cheers,
Charly -
Yep... I agree... we get thousands of visitors every day through category pages.
-
not really my point - my point is categorisation on large sites is helpful to search engines and users. WP does this very well and I utilise it a whole bunch on my sites that use WP
-
It would not be a problem because I use Wordpress
-
This is exactly my fear, be regarded as SPAM.
-
thats not always the case, consider a user may remember a number easier than a url which is descriptive (eg .com/12345 vs .com/this-is-a-blog-post-title-and-url ) however the numbers aren't descriptive and so hold no real seo value
- this said regardless of what option is choosen Google could always decide to prefer another mechanism in ranking for urls - or totally ignore them
-
I think you should structure your URL from the point of view of the reader rather than Google - that way you future proof yourself against any Google updates.
-
this depends on the size and nature of your site. For instance if you've lots of posts about a topic within your site (say "social media" or "email marketing") it is best to have them as a category and your post title to follow. Otherwise you could have issues in that you end up needing to put "email-marketing" in each post url ... which isn't pretty to do manually
-
I'd be inclined to go shorter. I don't believe you're going to see any additional ranking benefits from having the keyword in the URL twice (might be different if the keyword was in the domain AND the URL, but even then...).
I'd be a little concerned that having the keyword in there twice might look spammy to Google, too.
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
-
301 vs. keeping identical URL
Hey everybody! I have a question pertaining to our redesign. The situation is as follows: /drug-rehab/alcohol-withdrawal-los-angeles gets a decent amount of views on out website, and we would like it to be on our redesigned site. I was curious what impact, if any, I would see given the two scenarios below. 301 to /alcohol-withdrawal make the new page /drug-rehab/alcohol-withdrawal-los-angeles as well The second situation is that there are a serious of other pages which don't seem to be of drastic benefit, which I don't feel NEED to be on the website. For example: /post-acute-alcohol-withdrawal-treatment/drug-los-angeles /rehabs-resources/drug-abuse/sub-acute-alcohol-withdrawal etc It appears to me that the content on these pages is rather similar, and I feel like they don't really say anything special. Can I 301 them to the new page? Should I let them die in the black hat inferno they were made in? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated! Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | HashtagHustler0 -
Canonical URL Category and Tags
Hello, I would like to know that I want to use both category and tags in my blog StylishMahi. If I index both category and tags, should I use canonical URL tag to pass referring to main category. As I want more my categories in SERP results ranking higher? I have also attached a picture. Can someone please confirm? Photo by Moz ZigdWMx
On-Page Optimization | | PratapSingh0 -
301 redirects, efficiency and dynamic URLs
Hi, I have 2 301 redirect questions. Question 1: I have am working with a designer on the redesign of a website that currently has over 5,000 indexed pages. The majority of these are dynamic URLs from the Stone Locator database. (see below) http://www.domain.com/storelocator.php?zipcode=91784&page=12 How can I efficiently deal with these pages from an SEO perspective when developing the new site? Is there a way to do a bulk 301 redirect to a store locator page, for instance? Question 2: If a rel=canonical tag has been established on a page (www....), is it necessary to add 301 redirects to all of the other versions on: the home page (domain.com , domain.com/index.html, domain.com/index.html, etc.) all other pages with those same extensions ? Thank you for your help! Erin
On-Page Optimization | | HiddenPeak0 -
Page authority 1 for new URLs
Hi There Quite a beginner question. I have changed url structure last week and is already avaliable on google.What i find strange is that the PA reported by SEOMOZ is 1 and there's no google cache. If the page has to crawled yet, why it's avaliable on google index already? Dario
On-Page Optimization | | Mrlocicero0 -
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
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
Long Url but makes no sense
Hi Just joined. Crawl states that I am getting a lot of errors, looks like the spider is getting confused and looping back on itself ? Is there a way to see where the crawl was formulated (ie where from) ? It is generating urls like: http://www.wickman.net.au/wineauction/wine_auction_alert.aspx/auction/auction/auction/auction/auction/auction/Default.aspx from http://www.wickman.net.au/wineauction/wine_auction_alert.aspx
On-Page Optimization | | blinkybill0 -
Getting Google to provide a different URL in SERP
For one of my client’s sites, I have several keywords that are ranking in the top 5 positions. However, they have a high bounce rate. I believe this is because Google is delivering a different URL than the page we have optimized for the keyword. Any suggestions on ways I can get Google to present our preferred page?
On-Page Optimization | | TopFloor0 -
URL structure for a new WordPress site
Hi I'm building a new next big thing website from scratch (for a translation agency) and I encountered an issue with the URL structure. I need to chose the URL for important targeted keyword pages and I have a conflict between two tools I'm using. Please read below the situation: domain: mashtranslation.com target keyword: french translation services which URL you think is better from a SEO point of view (and possibly for users): mashtranslation.com/services/french/ OR mashtranslation.com/french-translation-services/ I'm asking this because one WordPress plugin (Wordpress SEO by Yoast) says the URL structure is not optimised while another tool (Market Samurai) says the URL is optimised.
On-Page Optimization | | flo20