Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
All page files in root? Or to use directories?
-
We have thousands of pages on our website; news articles, forum topics, download pages... etc - and at present they all reside in the root of the domain /.
For example:
/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/what-is-best-addon-t3360.htmlWe are considering moving over to a new URL system where we use directories. For example, the above URLs would be the following:
/images/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/forums/what-is-best-addon-t3360.htmlWould we have any benefit in using directories for SEO purposes? Would our current system perhaps mean too many files in the root / flagging as spammy? Would it be even better to use the following system which removes file endings completely and suggests each page is a directory:
/images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/If so, what would be better: /images/aosta-valley/6816/ or /images/6816/aosta-valley/
Just looking for some clarity to our problem!
Thank you for your help guys!
-
To my knowledge there hasn't been a definitive conclusion on this one.
The general advice as I know it seems to be: they are equally good, pick one, and make sure the other one (with slash if you choose to go for 'without slash' or vice versa) redirects to the chosen one (to avoid duplicate content).
-
I would personally place the keywords at the end for clarity. It indeed seems unnatural to have the id as the final part of the URL. Even if that does indeed cost you a tiny bit of 'keyword power', I would glady sacrifice that in exchange for a more user-friendly URL.
Limiting the amount of words in the URL does indeed make it look slightly less spammy, but slightly less user friendly as well. I guess this is just one of those 'weigh the pros/cons and decide for yourself'. Just make sure the URLs don't get rediculously long.
-
OK, so I have taken it upon myself to now have our URLs as follows:
/news/853/free-flight-simulator/
Anything else gets 301'd to the correct URL. /news/853/free-flight-simulator would be 301'd to /news/853/free-flight-simulator/ along with /news/853/free-flight-sifsfsdfdsfmulator/ ... etc.
-
Also, trailing slash? Or no trailing slash?
Without
/downloads/878/fsx-concorde
With
/downloads/878/fsx-concorde/
-
Dear Theo,
Thank you for your response - i found your article very interesting.
So, just to clarify - in our case, the best URL method would be:
/images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/This would remove the suffixes and also have the ID numbers at the end; placing the target keywords closer to the root of the URL; which makes a very slight difference...
EDIT: Upon thinking about it, I feel that the final keyword-targeted page would be more natural if it appeared at the end of the URL. For example: /images/6816/aosta-valley/ (like you have done on your blog).
Also, should I limit the amount of hyphenated words in the URL? For example in your blog, you have /does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/ - perhaps it would be more concentrated and less spammy as /adding-suffix-urls-affect-seo/ ?
Let me know your thoughts.
Thank you for your help!
-
Matt Cutts states that the number of subfolders 'it is not a major factor': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_A1iRY6XTM
Furthermore, a blog I wrote about removing suffixes: http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/5/does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/
Another Matt Cutts regarding your seperate question about the keyword order: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I
Having some structure (in the form of a single subfolder) would greatly add to the usability of your website in my opinion. If you can manage to use the correct redirects (301) from your old pages to your new ones, I wouldn't see a clear SEO related reason not to switch.
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
-
Should I use noindex or robots to remove pages from the Google index?
I have a Magento site and just realized we have about 800 review pages indexed. The /review directory is disallowed in robots.txt but the pages are still indexed. From my understanding robots means it will not crawl the pages BUT if the pages are still indexed if they are linked from somewhere else. I can add the noindex tag to the review pages but they wont be crawled. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-do-not-use-noindex-in-robots-txt-20873.html Should I remove the robots.txt and add the noindex? Or just add the noindex to what I already have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Using Canonical URL to poin to an external page
I was wondering if I can use a canonical URL that points to a page residing on external site? So a page like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | llamb
www.site1.com/whatever.html will have a canonical link in its header to www.site2.com/whatever.html. Thanks.0 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
Use of subdomains, subdirectories or both?
Hello, i would like your advice on a dilemma i am facing. I am working a new project that is going to release soon, thats a network of users with personal profiles seperated in categories for example lets say the categories are colors. So let say i am a member and i belong in red color categorie and i got a page where i update my personal information/cv/resume as well as a personal blog thats on that page. So the main site is giving the option to user to search for members by the criteria of color. My first idea is that all users should own a subdomain (and this is how its developed so far) thats easy to use and since the domain name is really small (just 3 letters) i believe subdomain worth since personal site will be easy to remember. My dilemma is should all users own a subdomain, a subdirectory or both and if both witch one should be the canonical? Since it said that search engines treat subdomains as different stand-alone sites, whats best for the main site? to show multiple search results with profiles in subdomains or subdirectories? What if i use both? meaning in search results i use search directory url for each profile while same time each profile owns a subdomains as well? and if so which one should be the canonical? Thanks in advance, C
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HaCos0 -
Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" /> With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
Sitemaps. When compressed do you use the .gz file format or the (untidy looking, IMHO) .xml.gz format?
When submitting compressed sitemaps to Google I normally use the a file named sitemap.gz A customer is banging on that his web guy says that sitemap.xml.gz is a better format. Google spiders sitemap.gz just fine and in Webmaster Tools everything looks OK... Interested to know other SEOmoz Pro's preferences here and also to check I haven't made an error that is going to bite me in the ass soon! Over to you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey0