URL Structure for Study Guides
-
I'm creating study guides for various musicals, plays and operas. A few issues:
- I want to easily view in Google Analytics data for all study guides, data at the category level (musical,play, opera) and data for an individual show.
- I want urls to be as short as possible for usability purposes.
- Some show titles are the same for shows in different categories. For example, there is the play Romeo and Juliet but there is also an opera Romeo and Juliet.
- Each study guide contains multiple sections that will live on different URLs (overview, context, plot summary, characters)
What would be the ideal URL structure? Here's what I was currently thinking we should use:
/show/play/romeo-juliet/
/show/play/romeo-juliet/context
/show/play/romeo-juliet/plot
/show/play/romeo-juliet/characters
-
Thanks! I think we'll go ahead and remove /shows from the URL structure and use Advanced Segments in Analytics.
-
Absolutely, what you would do is create an advanced segment in Google Analytics which includes all of the show types. That will give the same info.
There is even an alternative if you want to have this in the old way in Google Analytics, you would overwrite the usual pageview and create a custom one. For example on this page: /play/romeo-juliet the normal pageview would be: ga('send', 'pageview'); if you would change it to: ga('send', 'pageview', '/show/play/romeo-juliet'); it would still record the view in the old way. As I said, I don't like creating custom pageviews for this purpose.
-
If I don't use the /shows subdomain, is there still a good way to see in Google Analytics how much traffic is going to the study guides in general, regardless of show type?
-
Hi Jason,
Why not do it shorter and use: /play/romeo-juliet and /opera/romeo-juliet so you would drop the /show/ part out of the URL? Then /play/ or /plays/ would be an overview of all plays. Besides that I think you did a great job for the URL structure. You've checked if these are the keyword most people look for: content, plot, characters, right?
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
-
Tool to check page size for multiple url's at once
In Google Analytics under Site Speed > Page Timings, you can see all pages and their loading time compared to the average. This is very handy to check which pages maybe need some optimization. I would also like to check the size for these pages in a similar way. There are multiple tools out there like GTmetix and Pingdom that give specific information and performance insights. The problem is that they are limited to check one url at a time. Does someone know about a tool to check the page size of multiple url’s at once (and if possible to easily export to Excel)? That way I can check which pages are big in size and research/optimize them. Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | Mark.0 -
Dynamic URL parameter generator
Hi Is any one privy to an online tool that will let me create a dynamic URL parameter string but will allow me to generate multiples of the URL and add a distinct key for each one. E.g Campaign Source, Medium, Name, a Keywords etc. are all the same in the string but then I want to generate a unique id code at the end. Then export them as a csv and integrate into my database lists. Looking to run this into a few thousand as well. I was going to just do this in Excel and combine two columns withe the string and the number count in the other column but if there is a tool that does it all that would be interesting to know.
Reporting & Analytics | | David-E-Carey0 -
URL Keyword & Meta Title Problem
I was just reviewing my Moz report and came across something I could use advice on. The Keyword is "irish cardigans" I just moved to down a place to #5. I was going to add content to the page and back link a little to get back up on rankings but I noticed it is not all matching up. My Keyword is "irish cardigans" My Url is structured: products/traditional-irish-clothing-arans My metatitle is: Irish Sweaters - Traditional Irish Clothing - Arans & Cardigans The content title on the page heading is: Irish Sweaters and Cardigans. How will I change this to get my ranking better for "Irish Cardigans" The Page is also ranking for "Traditional Irish Clothing and Irish Sweaters" How do I know if I structure it to "Irish Cardigans" I will not loose traffic etc from the other keywords. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | robbieire0 -
Large event site - how should I structure my URLs?
Hi guys, I'm working on a new website which is consolidating a number of existing event sites into one. The existing sites use a variety of URL structures: www.eventsite1.com/events/event-name www.eventsite2.com/festival-program/event-name www.eventsite3.com/event-name This inconsistency has led to issues with tracking category usage properly in analytics - for instance, with eventsite3.com, events fall within categories (www.eventsite3.com/category-name) but as soon as you drill into an event detail page (www.eventsite3.com/event-name) from the category page, the category is lost to analytics. This is compounded when one event lives within multiple categories, as I can't figure out which category is the most effective for a particular event. I've seen other event sites establish a canonical URL for a primary category, display it in the URL (i.e. www.eventsite4.com/primary-category/event-name) yet still let that event get hit via the secondary categories (www.eventsite4.com/secondary-category/event-name). This way, the categories get passed to analytics without any duplicate content issues (i.e. via the setting of canonicals) Basically, I want to make sure that whatever instruction I give to the devs for the new site re: URL structure is correct from an SEO perspective and analytics perspective. Do I even need to worry about having the category in the URL? Can someone please help me with this? Hope this makes sense Cheers
Reporting & Analytics | | cos20300 -
Google News traffic spike mystery; referring URLs all blank, Omniture tags didn't fire.
Our content is occasionally featured in Google News. We recently have had two episodes where this happened, but (a) nearly all the referring URLs were blank, and (b) our backend logs show 3-4x more requests for the article in question than Omniture does. In other words, hundreds of thousands of visitors requested a URL from our site (as proven by the traffic logs), but don't seem to have come from Google News (because HTTP_REFERER was blank), and didn't execute the onpage javascript tag to notify Omniture of the pageview. Perhaps this has nothing to do with Google News, but it is too strong a coincidence that the two times we were on there recently, the same thing happened: big backend traffic spike that is not seen by Omniture. It is as if Google News causes browsers to pre-fetch our article without executing the javascript on the page. And without sending a referring URL. Has anyone else seen anything like this before? Stats from the recent episode:
Reporting & Analytics | | mcglynn
- 835,000 HTTP requests for the article URL (logged by our servers) - these requests came from 280,000 distinct IP addresses (70% US) - the #1 referring URL is blank. This accounts for 99.4% of requests. Which, in itself, is hard to believe. These people had to come from somewhere. I believe browsers don't pass HTTP_REFERER when you click from an SSL page to a non-SSL page, but I think Google News doesn't bounce users to SSL by default.That said, we do see other content pages with 70-90% blank referring URLs. Rarely 99+% though.0 -
No Link Data Available for this URL appears often. Are my sites too small to show up?
I am on the trial until Mar 5, 2012. I seldom get the info I want. Is it because my sites are too narrow a niche? I don't seem to be getting the data I'd like from your service. I'm trying to like it, but when I keep getting messages like this, it makes it hard to justify: "No Link Data Available for this URL appears often" Sample sites that I am unable to get data. I especially would like to know how many backlinks exist for each site. I paid someone to help me with them and I'd like to verify their work.: http://costaricadentistreview.com/ http://costaricadentistreviews.com/ http://costaricadentalimplants.org Any suggestions? Thanx Kurt Gross
Reporting & Analytics | | kurtray0 -
How to find out which URLs are NOT indexed on a site
Is there a way to easily find out which URLs on a store-type site are NOT being indexed in Google? For example, if my sitemap information in Google Webmaster tools shows I have 7342 URLs in my sitemap and 5699 of those indexed, how do I find out what the 1643 non-indexed URLS are? Thanks for any help!
Reporting & Analytics | | GregWalt0 -
How to change a url for google analytics account
We recently changed the url of a client's website. Is there a way to change the url on the ga account instead of creating a new account so that we don't lose comparative data? Thanks! Sorry- I know this is a novice question.
Reporting & Analytics | | marketing12340