Confused: Url Restructure
-
Hello,
We're giving our website a bit of a spring clean in terms of SEO. The site is doing ok, but after the time invested in SEO, content and last year's migration of multiple sites into one, we're not seeing the increase in traffic we had hoped.
Our current urls look something like this:
/a-cake-company/cup-cakes/strawberry
We have the company name as the first level as we with the migration we migrated many companies into one site. What we're considering is testing some pages with a structure like this:
/cup-cakes/cup-cake-company-strawberry
So we'll lose a level and we'll focus more on the category of the product rather than the brand.
What's your thoughts on this? We weren't going to do a mass change yet, just a test, but is this something we should be focusing on? In terms of organisation our current url structure is perfect, but what about from an SEO point of view? In terms of keywords customers are looking for both options.
Thanks!
-
Hi again Harry
Here's what I would do.
I would take a look at the following resources:
On-Page Factors (Moz)
The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites (KISSmetrics)
17 Essential SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Sites (Inc)
Technical Site Audit Checklist: 2015 Edition (Moz)There are probably opportunities beyond your URL structure that you are missing - your URL structure and depth (you're not going that deep at all) alone won't hurt your PA and DA the way you think it will.
Do a quick honest assessment of the layout and content of your website and see where you can enhance areas.
Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck!
-
Thanks Patrick!
They are all separate companies and our customer deals with all the different brands, so we have to keep them all separate.
We currently are using:** /cake-company/cupcakes/type-of-cupcake **as suggested, but we're worried it's too far down by the time you get to the product?
We've seen the PA be significantly reduced by being this deep and wonder if it has any other effect SEO wise?
Thank you!
-
Hi again
I see - sorry about that!
If you are showcasing different companies on your site then it should be...
/cake-company/cupcakes/type-of-cupcake
Apologies on that. Out of curiosity - are all of these companies separate and active companies? Or did they all merge into one larger company? Or is this like a listing website of different companies an their products?
-
Thanks for your response Patrick!
The problem we have is that because we represent 8 brands, these aren't in our domain, so in order to include the domain we currently have those as level one, e.g.:
/cake-company-1
/cake-company-2
/cake-company-3etc...
Our current url structure allows us to have the site neatly organised under each manufacturer of our products, but this then makes the urls quite long and deep.
Would you suggest combining the brand with the product it's self so that they are both in the url and this therefore reduces the url by one level?
E.g. - /cake-company-1-cup-cakes/strawberry
That way we can have:
/cake-company-2-cup-cakes/strawberry
/cake-company-3-cup-cakes/strawberry
/cake-company-4-cup-cakes/strawberryEtc?
Thanks!
-
Hi there
If it were upto me, I would suggest the URLs going something like this:
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/strawberry
This tells me the brand, the type of product, and then a specific product. The beauty here is you can do it with all of your products (if you have more):
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/carrot-cake
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/strawberry-lemonade
www.brandname.com/cakes/bundtIf you have variations below cupcake but above flavor, you can add that between cupcakes and flavors, so:
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/variation/flavors
or...
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/best-sellers/flavors
www.brandname.com/cupcakes/favorites/flavorsEither way, I wouldn't put your company name as a folder path because it should already be in the domain of your website.
Here are some more resources if you want to read a bit more into URL structures - here is a great resource as well from Rand - I suggest doing so!
Hope this helps a bit! Let me know if you have any questions or comments - good luck!
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
-
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
Automatically check if URL has been optimised?
Hi guys, I have a massive list of URLs and want to check if the primary keyword for each URL has been optimised. I'm looking for something similar to Moz on-page grader which grades the URL and primary keyword with a single metric e.g. grade a, b, c However, Moz doesn't offer an API to pull this score automatically. I was wondering does anyone know of any tools which you can access their API to do something like this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
URL Change Best Practice
I'm changing the url of some old pages to see if I can't get a little more organic out of them. After changing the url, and maybe title/desc tags as well, I plan to have Google fetch them. How does Google know that the old url is 301'd to the new url and the new url is not just a page of duplicate content? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them
How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Does this work as a tactic for including keyword in URL structure
Howdy, I'm planning out a website and need to plan out the URL structure for best SEO value. Generally I would do something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive
site.com/widgetssite.com/widgets/large
site.com/widgets/large/blue
etc. I think this is a pretty straight forward SEO tactic. The issue I have with it is in terms of natural language the "thing" you are searching for in this case is a widget, so typically you would type/search [adjective] [noun], or in this case "large blue widgets." So one proposal I have is to instead append the "widget" to the end of the URL:
site.com/large-widgets
site.com/large/blue-widgets
site.com/large/blue/square-widgets
etc. Obviously this breaks the whole silo concept since the square-widgets page is inside the /blue directory but the blue widgets page isn't at /blue it is /blue-widgets. My solution is to setup 301 redirects from /blue to /blue-widgets (even thought there are no site links pointing to that page). Does this seem like a good idea? Or does this break the whole folder silo concept? What I like about it is that it feels more user friendly in terms of natural language and for certain high value keywords we can get certain pairings of words into the URL more like how a person would type them in.0 -
How Long Before a URL is 'Too Long'
Hello Mozzers, Two of the sites I manage are currently in the process of merging into one site and as a result, many of the URLs are changing. Nevertheless (and I've shared this with my team), I was under the impression that after a certain point, Google starts to discount the validity of URLs that are too long. With that, if I were to have a URL that was structured as follows, would that be considered 'too long' if I'm trying to get the content indexed highly within Google? Here's an example: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/article and in some cases, it can go as deep as: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/organization/article. Albeit there is no current way for me to shorten these URLs is there anything I can do to make sure the content residing on a similar path is still eligible to rank highly on Google? How would I go about achieving this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith0 -
Product URL structure for a marketplace model
Hello All. I run an online marketplace start-up that has around 10000 products listed from around 1000+ sellers. We are a similar model to etsy/ebay in the sense that we provide a platform but sellers to list products and sell them. I have a URL structure question. I have read http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-define-best-url-structure-for-product-pages which seems to show everyone suggests to use Products: products/category/product-name Categories: products/category as the structure for product pages. Because we are a marketplace (our category structure has multiple tiers sometimes up to 3) our sellers choose a category for products to go in. How we have handled this before is we have used: Products: products/last-tier-category-chosen/product-name (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks/fluffy-marshmallows) Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks) However we have two issues with this: The categories can sometimes change, or users can change them which means the links completely change and undo any link building work built up. The urls can get a bit long and am worried that the most important data (the fluffy marshmallow that reflects in the page title and content) is left till too late in the URL. As a result we plan to change our URL structure (we are going through a rebuild anyhow so losing old links is not an issue here) so that the new structure was: Products: products/product-name(eg: /products/fluffy-marshmallows) Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks) My concern about doing this however, and question here, is whether this willnegatively impact the "structure" of pages when google crawls our marketplace.Because "fluffy marshmallows" will no longer technically fit into the url structure of "sweets and snacks". I dont know if this would have a negative impact or not. FYI etsy (one of the largest marketplace models in the world) us the latter approach and do not have categories in product urls, eg: listing/42003836/vintage-french-industrial-inspired-side Any ideas on this? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamPatterson0 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120