What is the optimal URL Structure for Internal Pages
-
Is it more SEO friendly to have an internal page URL structure that reads like www.smithlawfirm.com/personal-injury/car-accidents or www.smithlawfirm.com/personal-injury-car-accidents? The former structure has the benefit of showing Google all the sub-categories under personal injury; the later the benefit of a flatter structure. Thanks
-
Thanks, I had read this post before adding my question.
-
The URL structure can be helpful for analysis when looking at your analytics. See this post at LunaMetrics for reasons why you might want a directory structure. http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/
-
Category wise structure is alwaz a better option.
If your site is small than you can keep all pages in root folder, but as your site grows it would be very difficult for you to manage all pages on root & google will treat all pages at same level
go for 1st option.
-
I agree with John and oznappies.
A logical category system is very useful for your site admins, users and SEO. There are many benefits to a simple /personal-injury/car-accidents design.
Sites need to be balanced. A structure that is overly deep with categories is not desired, but an overly flat structure where every page is a child of the home page isn't going to provide the best user experience either.
-
It's shouldn't matter either way... though I would strongly advise that you're organizing your content appropriately. The directory structure will then build itself. Slashes or dashes? I would build it with the slashes.
Keep it human readable and you'll be in good shape
-
Since you will most likely have more than one form of personal injury, it would make more sense for a site architecure point of view to use category/type model ie. personal-injury/car-accidents. There probably is not any ranking difference, except that you could have a personal-injury landing page that links to the injury types and gains link juice in it's own right.
-
Rafi, I handle a few law firms that are involved in PI. I will give you an example of a site that performs very well: Actos-Lawsuit.org. If you look at our url structure you will see two things, hyphens and flat. You are asking about the firm site I am assuming. Obviously, you don't want more than three steps to any page. Within that context, I still believe the flatter the better. To take something from someone else a few months back regarding hyphens, look at the url on the page you are now viewing and what do you see? My suggestion is yes for the keeping it flat and absolutely yes for hyphens. Hope this helps.
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
-
19 Hours Excessive to Code Single Wordpress Page?
My developer says that is will take 19 hours to modify a listing page of the wpcasa London real estate theme because the existing template is difficult to customize. I am attaching an image of the existing page before customization and an image of a final mock up. Is 19 hours a reasonable amount of time to customize this page? Look forward to feedback. New Design is visible at: https://imgur.com/a/42XBqDD Alan IQ1i0kg
Web Design | | Kingalan10 -
Should i not use hyphens in web page titles? Google Penalty for hyphens?
all the page titles in my site have hyphens between the words like this: http://texas.com/texas-plumbers.html I have seen tests where hyphenated domain names ranked lower than non hyphenated domain names. Does this mean my pages are being penalized for hyphens or is this only in the domain that it is penalized? If I create new pages should I not use hyphens in the page titles when there are two or more words in the title? If I changed all my page titles to eliminate the hyphens, I would lose all my rankings correct? My site is 12 years old and if I changed all these titles I'm guessing that each page would be thrown in the google sandbox for several months, is this true? Thanks mozzers!
Web Design | | Ron100 -
Decreasing Page Load Time with Placeholder Images - Good Idea or Bad Idea?
In an effort to decease our page load time, we are looking at making a change so that all product images on any page past page 1 load with a place holder image. When the user clicks to the next page, it then loads all of the images for that page. Right now, all of the product divs are loaded into a Javascript array and loaded in chunks to the page display div. Product-heavy pages significantly increase load time as the browser loads all of the images from the product HTML before the Javascript can rewrite the display div with page-specific product HTML. In order to get around this, we are looking at loading the product HTML with a small placeholder image and then substituting the appropriate product image URLs when each page is output to the display div. From a user experience, this change will be seamless and they won't be able to tell the difference, plus they will benefit from a potentially a short wait on loading the images for the page in question. However, the source of the page will have all of the product images in a given category page all having the same image. How much of a negative impact will this have on SEO?
Web Design | | airnwater0 -
404 page not found after site migration
Hi, A question from our developer. We have an issue in Google Webmaster Tools. A few months ago we killed off one of our e-commerce sites and set up another to replace it. The new site uses different software on a different domain. I set up a mass 301 redirect that would redirect any URLs to the new domain, so domain-one.com/product would redirect to domain-two.com/product. As it turns out, the new site doesn’t use the same URLs for products as the old one did, so I deleted the mass 301 redirect. We’re getting a lot of URLs showing up as 404 not found in Webmaster tools. These URLs used to exist on the old site and be linked to from the old sitemap. Even URLs that are showing up as 404 recently say that they are linked to in the old sitemap. The old sitemap no longer exists and has been returning a 404 error for some time now. Normally I would set up 301 redirects for each one and mark them as fixed, but there are almost quarter of a million URLs that are returning 404 errors, and rising. I’m sure there are some genuine problems that need sorting out in that list, but I just can’t see them under the mass of errors for pages that have been redirected from the old site. Because of this, I’m reluctant to set up a robots file that disallows all of the 404 URLs. The old site is no longer in the index. Searching google for site:domain-one.com returns no results. Ideally, I’d like anything that was linked from the old sitemap to be removed from webmaster tools and for Google to stop attempting to crawl those pages. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PASSLtd0 -
Do you think it will be a good idea to delete old blog pages off the server
I paid somebody to build my website using Dreamweaver, and at one point I didn't know how to use the template which automatically updates every page in the menu section so I stupidly broke the template on every new page when I made the websites blog and put the pages into a subfolder. I realised this was a silly thing to do and now and I now know how to use the template correctly I've copied every single page over from the subfolder and put it into the main template. Now I can update the template menu and every page changes automatically. The only problem is I've now got two versions of every page of my blog on the website. For some reason when I do a sitemap it comes up with a links to the old blog pages I, don't know why when I've removed the links from the blog page? and also the new copies also. I have basically got a copys of all blog pages. Do you think it will be a good idea to delete old indexed blog pages off the server so that when Google spiders the site it will pick up only the new links to the copy pages?
Web Design | | whitbycottages0 -
Custom 404 Page Indexing
Hi - We created a custom 404 page based on SEOMoz recommendations. But.... the page seems to be receiving traffic via organic search. Does it make more sense to set this page as "noindex" by its metatag?
Web Design | | sftravel0 -
Best way of conserving link juice from non important pages
If I have a bunch of non important pages on my website which are of little use in the SE's index - IE contact us pages, pages which are near duplicate and conflict with KW's targetting other pages etc, what is the best way of retaining the link juice that would normally be passed to these pages? Most recent discussion I have read has said that with nofollow you effectively just loose link juice, as opposed to conserving it, so that doesn't seem a great option. If I do "noindex" on these pages, would that conserve the link juice in the site, or again would it be just lost? It seems quite a tricky situation as many pages are legitimate for customer usability, but are not worth having in the SE's index and you better off consolidating link juice - so it seems you are getting penilised for making something "for users". Thanks
Web Design | | James770 -
Do iFrames embedded in a page get crawled?
Do iFrames embedded in a page get crawled? I have an iFrame which prints a page hosted by another company embedded in my page. Their links don't include rel=nofollow attributes, so I don't want Google to see them. Do spiders crawl the content in iFrames, or do I have to ensure that the links on this page include the nofollow attribute?
Web Design | | deuce1s0