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.
Should we use brand name of product in URL
-
Hi all,
What is best for SEO. We sell products online. Is it good to mention the brand in the product detail page URL key if (part of) the brand is also in the home url?
So our URL is: www.brandXstore.com
Is it best to do: www.brandXstore.com/brandX-productA.html
of just do: www.brandXstore.com/ProductA.html
Thanks for quick answering

-
Agree with Brady & Adam on this one. Each great responses.
I'll just add that, for the most part, the URL should be for the user first and then the search engine. A lot of times brands have funk looking URLs that have numbers and symbols in them - not user friendly. So, I'd recommend adding your descriptive keyword/producA/B/C into the URL if it'll help the user understand your product and navigate your site better

Hope this helps!
-
Inserting the brand name again in the product page portion of the URL is unnecessary and looks like a keyword stuffing technique. Assuming the brand you're representing gets a lot of search traffic, focusing on the power of your domain should be more than enough to attract visits to your site.
Focusing on users should be your main focus when designing URL structures. As a potential customer, repeating the brand name in the URL of pages would be unnecessary and unattractive. Thus, it will (probably) have the same effect on search engines. As Adam said, short and user-friendly is the way to go.
-
Hi Jeroen
I would look more into making sure the URLs are kept fairly short and friendly. I wouldn't expect a huge SEO impact from this, I would look more into the question "does including the brand name in the URL improve usability for my visitors?". Maybe you have several "ProductA" all by different brands? If this is the case then yes I would include the brand name in the URL.
If you are selling only BrandX products on your store and nothing else then I would not bother putting in the brand name as you are already including the brand in your main site URL. Having it twice could make the URL look at bit keyword stuffed.
Hope this helps.
Adam
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 we include URLs with parameters in the sitemap?
Hi, I wanted to know whether we can include URLs with search parameters in the sitemap. Currently, we are trying to append structured data for our job listing page. There happens to be a large number of job listings around 1000 pages with unique job-id and location. Should we add these pages in the sitemap or is there any other solution to this? Regards, Tejas
Algorithm Updates | | tejasbansode0 -
Folders or no folders in url?
What's best for SEO: a folder or no folder? For example: https://domain.com/arizona-dentist/somecontent or just https://domain.com/somecontent. The website has 100+ pages with "dentist" within the content of the somecontent pages, as well as specific pages for /arizona-dentist/. Also, the breadcrumb for the somecontent page would appear something like follows: Arizona Dentist > Some Content ... you can find the somecontent page from the Arizona Dentist page. I didn't include folders in the path because I did not want the url to be too long. In terms of where it is showing up on google search results...it is within the top 3-4 on the first page when searching Arizona dentist come content. The website is pretty organized even without subfolders because it was made using Umbraco. I am wondering if using folders will increase the SEO ranking, or if it really doesn't and could hurt it if paths become too long; especially since it's not doing too bad in the search ranking right now. -Thanks in advance for any help.
Algorithm Updates | | bellezze0 -
When Is It Okay To Use Bold, Underline & Italic Text? Should I Stay Away From My Keywords?
Hey guys I have a few questions. I am pretty sure that I was penalized by Panda a few years back because I went very heavy on bold, italic and underlining my keywords. Since then I removed the bold, italic and underlines and never have used them again. I was just reading an article on the Moz Blog and I saw some bold words. My questions are, When Is It Okay To Use Bold, Underline & Italic Text? Should I Stay Away From My Keywords? Any help would be great! Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | Videogamefan1 -
Ecommerce SEO: Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?
Hi ! In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages. For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category) Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
Algorithm Updates | | Inevo
_"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _ Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides? Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is. Looking forward to your answers 🙂0 -
Flat Structure URL vs Structured Sub-directory URL
We are finally taking our classifieds site forward and moving into a much improved URL structure, however, there is some disagreement over whether to go with a Flat URL structure or a structured sub-directory. I've browsed all of the posts and Q&A's for this going back to 2011, and still don't feel like I have a real answer. Has anyone tested this yet, or is there any consensus over ranking? I am in a disagreement with another SEO manager about this for our proposed URL structure redesign who is for it because it is what our competitors are doing. Our classifieds are geographically based, and we group by state, county, and city. Most of our traffic comes from state and county based searches. We also would like to integrate categories into the URL for some of the major search terms we see. The disagreement arises around how to structure the site. I prefer the logical sub-directory style: [sitename]/[category]/[state]/[county]/
Algorithm Updates | | newspore
mysite.com/for-sale/california/kern-county/
or
[sitename]/[category]/[county]-county-[stateabb]/
mysite.com/for-sale/kern-county-ca/ I don't mind the second, except for when you look at it in the context of the whole site: Geo Landing Pages:
mysite.com/california/
mysite.com/los-angeles-ca-90210/ Actual Search Pages:
mysite.com/for-sale/orange-ca/[filters] Detail Pages:
mysite.com/widget-type/cool-product-name/productid I want to make sure this flat structure performs better before sacrificing my analytics sanity (and ordered logic). Any case studies, tests or real data around this would be most helpful, someone at Moz must've tackled this by now!0 -
Exact Keywords Domain name
Hello everyone!, I would love to have your opinion on this matter. I am working on a company e-commerce site; these guys would like to change their domain name AND their company name, so the most logical thing that came to mind was to name the domain after the company name. However, they also bought in the past a domain that have the exact keyword they would like to rank for. I know that keywords in the URL are not as important as they used to be in the past, but nonetheless when I do a Google search for those keywords, 3 domains out of 10 on the first page are slight variations of those same keywords, meaning that they might have a really good domain name (also the other result are government, medical stuff and so on). And, no matter how many times I have read that keywords in the URL are not so important anymore, I still see a lot of sites ranking also because of their domain name (well at least outside the US) So, my question here is: would it be better for them to use the exact match keyword-domain name or should they use their company name for their new site? Or some sort combination of the two? (the keyword-domain that in some way points also to the brand domain). Thanks for your opinions on this; really appreciate it! Cheers
Algorithm Updates | | Eyah0 -
How to use MOZ to improve my website
Hi, I am new for MOZ, have no idea how to improve my website with the function of MOZ, can anyone share their experience for using MOZ service. the more detail the better! Thanks a lot in advance! John Thanks for helps for everyone, it took me some time to read each answer, and also spend few days to study MOZ. My initial conclusion is the function of MOZ is to promote the idea of SEO, but not provide any specific SEO service for specific website except for some tools and report. So I am missing or misunderstanding MOZ's service, it will be always welcome to help me out by correcting my opinion. Anyway, thanks again for all the time you've given to me, and good to you all! -John.
Algorithm Updates | | Steplead1 -
To use the same content just changing the keywords could be seen as duplicate content?
I want to offer the same service or product in many different cities, so instead of creating a new content for each city what I want to do it to copy the content already created for the product and service of a city and then change the name of the city and create a new url inside my website for each city. for example let say I sell handmade rings in the USA, but I want o target each principal city in the USA, so I have want to have a unque url for ecxh city so for example for Miami I want to have www.mydomain.com/handmade-rings-miami and for LA the url would be www.mydomain.com/handmade-rings-la Can I have the same content talking about the handmade rings and just change the keywords and key phrases? or this will count as a duplicate content? content: TITLE: Miami Handmade Rings URL :www.mydomain.com/handmade-rings-miami Shop Now handmade rings in Miami in our online store and get a special discount in Miami purchases over $50 and also get free shipping on Miami Local address... See what our Miami handmade rings clients say about our products.... TITLE: LA Handmade Rings URL: www.mydomain.com/handmade-rings-la Shop Now handmade rings in LA in our online store and get a special discount in LA purchases over $50 and also get free shipping on LA Local address... See what our LA handmade rings clients say about our products.... There are more than 100 location in the country I want to do this, so that is why I want to copy paste and replace.. Thanks in advance, David Orion
Algorithm Updates | | sellonline1230