Page title and slug as complements to one another?
-
When creating a page, is it ever worthwhile to ensure that there's minimal duplication in the keywords in the page title vs. the slug?
Or is it more like the title is more like a sentence description of the page and the slug is a scannable set of keywords that describes the page, and duplication doesn't really matter.
-
They don't have a specific algorithm for it, but best practice is to keep them as short as possible. When you build your slugs ask yourself if a searcher could guess what this page is about based on the shorter slug. If they probably couldn't, then you would probably want add as little as possible so they could guess it.
The title should effectively communicate it, and the slug should reflect it. Also, remember that the rules for titles is even shorter with one of Google's recent updates with larger titles in the SERPs.
-
I read somewhere that Google frowns upon slugs being longer than five words.
Do you try to follow this practice as well?
-
First off, duplication doesn't matter. Hopefully your title and slug are about the same topic.
That being said, my goal for the title is to be catchy, and my goal for the slug is to succinctly reflect that. A basic practice you can do is take the title, remove the stop words, and that's your title. No need to use words like the, in, on or a in a link. Just adds unnecessary dashes, and makes it longer. There's always exceptions to this, but in general this is what I practice for good results.
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
-
Webshop landing pages and product pages
Hi, I am doing extensive keyword research for the SEO of a big webshop. Since this shop sells technical books and software (legal books, tax software and so on), I come across a lot of very specific keywords for separate products. Isn't it better to try and rank in the SERP's with all the separate product pages, instead of with the landing (category) pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
What to do about endless size pages
I'm working on a site that sells products that come in many different sizes. One product may come in 30 sizes.The products themselves are identical, except for the size. There are collections pages that are all of several kinds of product in a particular size and then there are individual product pages of one product the specific size. Collections pages for widgets size 30 is the same content as widgets size 29. A single product page for gold-widget-size-30 is the same content as the single product page gold-widget-size-29. To make matters worse, they all have the same tags and very little written content. The site is in Shopify. Last month there were almost 400 pages that produced visits on organic, mostly in the 1 to 4 per month range, but all together about 1000 visits. There are several hundred more that produced no traffic in organic, but are duplicate (except for size) and part of this giant ball of tangled string. What do you think I should do? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Links on page
Hi I have a web page which lists about 50-60 products which links out to either a pdf on the product or the main manufacturers website page containing product detail. The site in non e-commerce is this the site/page likely to get hit by Penguin? Would it be best to create a separate page for the product/manufacturer group i.e 5 or 6 pages but linking out to the PDFs etc...?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Noindex search pages?
Is it best to noindex search results pages, exclude them using robots.txt, or both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
301 redirect for page 2, page 3 etc of an article or feed
Hey guys, We're looking to move a blog feed we have to a new static URL page. We are using 301 redirects but I'm unsure of what to regarding page 2, page 3 etc. of the feed. How do I make sure those urls are being redirected as well? For example: Moving FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/ to a new page url FloridaDentist.com/dental-tips. So, we are using a 301 on that old url to the new one. My questions is what to do with the other pages like FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/page/3. How do we make sure that page is also 301'd to the new main url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Wordpress - Dynamic pages vs static pages
Hi, Our site has over 48,000 indexed links, with a good mix of pages, posts and dynamic pages. For the purposes of SEO and the recent talk of "fresh content" - would it be better to keep dynamic pages as they are or manually create static pages/ subpages. The one noticable downside with dynamic pages is that they arent picked up by any sitemap plugins, you need to manually create a separate sitemap just for these dynamic links. Any thoughts??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danialniazi1 -
Best way to transfer pagerank from one site to another
We currently own two sites (with unique domains) that accomplish a similar goal, but are completely different (so there's no duplicate content, etc) and were developed independently. Both sites have very good pagerank due to great press and inbound links over several years. Also both have thousands of pages and get a lot of inbound deep links. We plan on shutting one of the sites down so we can focus on the other. We'd like to transfer as much traffic and SEO/pagerank value from the one we're shutting down to the one we're continuing to focus on. What's the best way to do that? Should we just do a 301 redirect? Or keep the site running in some diminished form and link it to the site we're focusing on? I saw SEOmoz has a good guide on moving sites http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection which recommends a 301 redirect, but I wanted to see if the same applies when merging sites as we are in this case.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 212areacode0 -
Duplicate page titles and brand name
Duplicate page titles and brand name. According to SEOMOZ in my one of web site .there are many duplicate title tags some of them are company names .my problem is Do i need to make unique tile tags for each pages with keywords and what about putting company name in each page. 2)Is it necessary to put company name (Brand name ) in each page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0