Starting a Blog and URL Structure Advice
-
Hello SEOmoz Community,
We are going to start a blog on our website and have a slight dilemma. Our site is a .Net site and the blog platform we've chosen (BlogEngine) only allows us to use the following url structure: www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name. We've looked at other .Net blog software and this one meets all of our needs except for the ideal URL Structure.
We would like to remove the /post/ directory; however have not technically found a way to do it. We wanted to get some opinions on whether or not we should just start with this URL structure and not worry about the extra directory, or work to find another solution that eliminates this extra directory. Ideally we want to keep the posts as close to the root as possible for link juice distribution, and the extra directory could get in the way.
Also, if anyone has any advice on a more flexible .Net blog platform, suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
We thank you so much in advance for your time and help.
-
Yeah, it is awesome for really dynamic URLs and pretty cool how you can completely make up directory structure to match your navigation or help with usability.
-
Perfect...Thanks for all the help and feedback Mike!
-
If you have not implemented the blog yet, you will not have to use 301 redirects. You only need to 301 if you have existing content, then want to point it to the newer URL.
Here is a real-case scenario:
We had an old URL
domain.com/content.asp?ID=9XXX123M85&AID=KXXX123JSL
We used URL rewriting to change that to domain.com/product - this tells the server to fetch the information from the ugly URL and display it using the new friendly URL. We then had to set up a 301 from the ugly URL to the new URL, ONLY BECAUSE the ugly URL was already in place and receiving inbound links from other sites.
At this same time, we also created a new page
domain.com/content.asp?ID=9XXX123M85&AID=XXXNEWPAGE
We used URL rewriting to change that to domain.com/solutions/feature - again, this tells the server to fetch the content from the ugly URL and display it using the friendly URL. This time, we did not need to set up a 301, because this was a brand new page.
From my research and understanding, there are no negative repercussions in using URL rewriting on new pages; however, if you use URL rewriting, you SHOULD also incorporate a 301 to redirect inbound links that were previously pointing to the old content.
Good luck Rich.
Mike
-
Thanks so much for the resource and feedback Mike...I have not looked into URL rewriting. I'll forward this on to our developer.
With the URL rewrites and 301 redirects, I wonder if there are any long-term negative implications for SEO as we will be building a large library of posts. Would it be better to leave /post/ in place without the URL rewrites and 301's? Trying to weigh the positives and negatives of one over the other.
This is a nice solution to our dilemma and we thank you
-
Thanks Mike. That answers my question above. There is a way to trick the server.
-
Have you looked into URL rewriting?
Jen did a great post on this here.
It more or less allows you to rewrite the URL however you want.
So instead of www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name you could do www.domain.com/blog/article/post-name or www.domain.com/blog/post-name or even www.domain.com/blog-post-name
Depending on your webserver, you should be able to accomplish this in a few lines of code.
Mike
-
I don't know the answer to this... just askin' in case a smart person knows.
Would there be any problem with using .htacess to get rid of the unwanted directory name... for example just 301 redirect everything from www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name to www.domain.com/post/post-name ?
I think that this would work since all of the action is on the server.
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
-
Use existing page with bad URL or brand new URL?
Hello, We will be updating an existing page with more helpful information with the goal of reaching more potential customers through SEO and also attaching a SEM campaign to the specific landing page. The current URL of the page scores 25 on Page Authority, and has 2 links to it from blog articles (PA 35, 31). The current content needs to be rewritten to be more helpful and also needs some additional information. The downsides are that it has an "bad" URL- no target keyword and uses underscores. Which of the following choices would you make? 1. Update this old "bad" URL with new content. Benefit from the existing PA. -or- 2. Start with a new optimized URL, reusing some of the old content and utilizing a 301 redirect from the previous page? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | XLMarketing0 -
Site structure headache
Hello all, I'm struggling to get to grips with a websites site structure. I appreciate that quality content is key etc, and the more content the better, but then I have issues with regards to doorway pages. For example im now starting to develop a lot of ecommerce websites and want to promote this service. should we have pages that detail all of the ins and outs of ecommerce - or should we simplify it to a couple of pages. what is best practice? Also isn't a content hub similar to having doorway pages? let me know what you think! William
Technical SEO | | wseabrook0 -
URL - Well Formed or Malformed
Hi Mozzers, I've been mulling over whether my URLs could benefit a little SEO tweaking. I'd be grateful for your opinion. For instance, we've a product, a vintage (second hand), red Chanel bag. At the moment the URL is: www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/2.55-bags/red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag-1362483150 Broken down... vintage-chanel-bags = this is the main product category, i.e. vintage chanel bags 2.55-bags = is a sub category of the main category above. They are vintage Chanel 2.55 bags, but I've not included 'vintage' again. 2.55 bags are a type of Chanel bag. red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag = this is the product, the bag **1362483150 **= this is a unique id, to prevent the possibility of duplicate URLs As you no doubt can see we target, in particular, the phrase **vintage. **The actual bag / product title is: Vintage Chanel Red 2.55 classic double flap bag 10” / 25cm With this in mind, would I be better off trying to match the product name with the end of the URL as closely as possible? So a close match below would involve not repeating 'chanel' again: www.vintageheirloom.com/chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag or an exact match below would involve repeating 'chanel': www.vintageheirloom.com/chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag This may open up more flexibility to experiment with product terms like second hand, preowned etc. Maybe this is a bad idea as I'm removing the phrase 'vintage' from the main category. But this logical extension of this looks like keyword stuffing !! www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/vintage-2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag Maybe this is over analyzing, but I doubt it? Thanks for looking. Kevin
Technical SEO | | well-its-1-louder0 -
Anyone using Adobe Business Catalyst and Fixing SEO URL Blog Updates?
Does anyone else have experience with the current update Adobe Business Catalyst has announced for their blog features? Florin at BC offered the code below: http://www.graeagle.com/images/fb_blog_og_img.jpg" /> However nether myself nor another commentator can figure out how to make it work: I added the meta data to my template but it seems the tags are not correct. For example, the tag {tag_blogpostmetatitle} does not automatically include the SEO title that I've called out in my individual blog post. So, it appears the browser is ignoring the tag and just including it as is. When I view the source for my live blog article, this is what I get for the lines that I've added the code in the tag: Also, I cannot get schema metadata to work on the BC blog. For example, I have used it on this page: http://www.homedestination.com/_blog/Real_Estate_Blog/post/things_to_know_before_building_a_new_home/; which yields the following in Google's Rich Snippet Tool: Extracted structured data rdfa-node property: title: {tag_blogpostmetatitle} description:__{tag_blogpostmetadescription}
Technical SEO | | jessential0 -
Second URL
Hi We have a .com and a .co.uk Main website is .co.uk, we also have a landing page for the .com If we redirect the .com to the .co.uk, will it create duplicate content ... May seem like a silly question, but want to be sure that that the visitors cant access our website at both urls, as that would be duplicate content Thanks in advance John
Technical SEO | | Johnny4B0 -
URL Structure for Deal Aggregator
I have a website that aggregates deals from various daily deals site. I originally had all the deals on one page /deals, however I thought that maybe it might be more useful to have several pages e.g. /beautydeals or /hoteldeals. However if I give every section it's own page that means I have either no current deals on the main /deals page or I will have duplicate content. I'm wondering what might be the best approach here? A few of the options that come to mind are: 1. Return to having all the deals on one page /deals and linking internally to content within that page
Technical SEO | | andywozhere
2. Have both a main /deals page with all of the deals plus other pages such as /beautydeals, but add re="canonical" to point to the main /deals page
3. Create new content for the /deals page... however I think people will probably want to see at least some deals straight away, rather than having to click through to another page.
4. Display some sub-categories on the main /deals page, but have separate URLs for other more popular sub-categories e.g. /beautydeals (this is how it works at the moment) I should probably point out that the site also has other content such as events and a directory. Any suggestions on how best to approach this much appreciated! Cheers, Andy0 -
Blog zero PR
Hi I am trying to establish why my main pages on my site has a PR2 but my Blog is PR0. Even though the traffic is spread between the blog and the main site. I also want to get to PR3 but I seem to never get close... Any advise would be very much appreciated...
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
What should be noindexed on a Wordpress blog?
I know this can be a "it depends" answer so I'll try to explain. Qualifications on your answers would be great. I use the Wordpress architecture for myself and clients on sites and blogs. Almost every business site we create has a blog and I'm always working to improve results on them. My strategy has been the following: Categories: General, main content types, general keywords. Index, follow Tags: Very specific, post specific, may only be used once for one post. My categories have descriptions that are displayed on the category pages with excerpts. Tags rarely have a description but are displayed with excerpts on the page. My idea has been to index the categories to crawl the content and they have unique content by showing the category description. Tags shouldn't be archived because they may be all over the place and may have only 1 post with no tag description. I'm trying to reduce duplicate content but I don't want to limit results for my clients and myself. Should I set tags to noindex, follow or should I have them indexed? The only thing I'm thinking with having the tags indexed is that I may be able to get additional traffic through the more specific tags (i.e. tag = meta tags, category = SEO).
Technical SEO | | JaredDetroit0