Keyword in URL - SEO impact
-
Hi,
We don't have most important keyword of our industry in our domain or sub-domain. How important it is to have keyword in website URL? Most of our competitors pages with "keyword" urls been listing in SERP. What is back-links role in this scenarion? And which URL have more advantage? keyword in sub-domain or page with keyword. Like for "seo" keyword..... seo.example.com or example.com/seo
-
Hi JK,
Thanks for the reply.
First of all, this is an old article, and many (if not all) of the information given has changed in Google search algorithms.
In the case you are describing, in nowadays SEO (2019), I'd suggest you not to focus on having any keyword weight in the domain/subdomain.
Keep both services in the same domain, under the same company name. Google will understand that its the same company offering two services. Of course, you should have different pages for both services.
Probably would be of help, creating really good content to give context and use internal linking to tell Google which are your main pages and targeted search terms.Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston -
GR,
Appreciate the advice. We are working with a customer that offers two very different services (janitorial services and pest control). We have 2 options for organizing their site.
Option A: 1 website under the main company name with dual focus
Option B: 2 seperate site 1 for each service giving main service the company domain name and the secondary service the company domain name - janitorial.com
Would enjoy to hear your thoughts on this!
Thanks,
JK
-
Yeap, it should be redirected to relevant pages. Not to the homepage nor less relevant pages, because it's treated as a soft 404 error.
Here a great article:
Proof That 301 Redirects To Less-Relevant Pages Are Seen As Soft 404s To Google [Case Study] Google May Treat Expired Products Page Redirects As Soft 404s And, what google considers as Soft 404 errorsHope it helps.
GR. -
Thanks GR.
I have gone through the Moz article on 301 redirects. They say that every redirect comes with certain amount of SEO risk. What exactly it might be?
And everybody say that we must redirect to relevant page. I can understand that 2 pages content must be relevant, but what's the importance of URL here? Do we need a match in URL keywords too? Because, if a non-existing link is redirected to existing page, what will be the metrics to pass link juice or any risk as there will be no content in one of these pages and how bots check? Like for below example:
website.com/folder/page1/content/ is a non-existing page and if it's redirected to website.com or website.com/folder2/page14.
Thanks,
Satish
-
You're welcome, we are here to help.
Theoretically, there is no linkjuice loss with redirects.
Take a look in this article about the last news and update on Google about 3xx redirects.:
301 Redirects Rules Change: What You Need to Know for SEOHope I've helped.
GR. -
Thanks for the suggestions GR. That gives us an idea to proceed on.
We are also planning to move all the links from one subdirectory to another subdirectory. But we will be redirecting them to related pages.
For example, website.com/folder1/seo-changes to website.com/folder2/seo-changes
Only sub directory gonna change. But we have many links pointing to sub directory we are directing. Do the same link juice passes to these links redirected to another sub directory?
-
Hi there.
I've conducted some experiments on having the keyword in several places: Exact match domain, subdomain, subdirectory and in the slug.
My conclusions are:- Having it in a subdomain doen't help at all.
- Having it in a exact match domain (e.g. keyword.com) helps very little and creates a problem when the business tries to expand to more search terms.
- Having it in a subdirectory (e.g. domain.com/my-keyword/some-page) doesnt help much, unless you're trying to rank the page that comes at the subdirectory. This latter makes it a single page or just a slug
- Having it in the slug (e.g. domain.com/single-page-keyword) helps, makes the difference.
My opinion, when it comes to on-page optimization and keyword optimization, it's mandatory to place the main (or some variation of it) in the final URL.
In all my expriments, always there was a correct optimization (on page and for that kw). And were focused for similar kw with similar search difficulties.---- UPDATE ---
Here some information and resources:15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs - Moz blog
URL - Moz's learn On-Page SEO: Anatomy of a Perfectly Optimized Page (2016 Update) - Backlinko---- UPDATE ---
Hope ir helps.
GR.
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
-
New websites issues- Duplicate urls and many title tags. Is it fine for SEO?
Hey everyone, I have found few code issues with our new website and wanted to see how bad those problems are and if I have missed anything. If someone can take a look at this and help me it would mean the world. Thank you. all! We hired an agency to design a new site for us and it's almost ready, but the other day I found some problems that made me wonder if this new site might not be as good as I thought and I wanted to ask you to take a look at the code and possibly help me understand if from SEO prospective it is sound. But I really want someone who understands SEO and web design to look at our code and point out what might be wrong there. Here is a link to the actual site which is on a new server: http://209.50.54.42/ What I found few days ago that made me wonder something might not be right. Problem 1. Each page has 3 title tags, I guess whatever template they are using it automatically creates 3 title tags. When you do " View Page Source" For example on this url: http://209.50.54.42/washington-dc-transportation when you view the code, the lines Lines 16,19 and 20 have the title tag which in my opinion is wrong and there should only be one. Could this hurt our SEO? Problem 2. Infinite duplicate urls found All following pages have INFINITE NUMBER OF DUPLICATE URLS. EXAMPLE: http://209.50.54.42/privacy-policy/8, http://209.50.54.42/privacy-policy/1048, http://209.50.54.42/privacy-policy/7, http://209.50.54.42/privacy-policy/1, http://209.50.54.42/privacy-policy you can add any type of number to this url and it will show the same page. I really think this 2nd problem is huge as it will create duplicate content. There should be only 1 url per page, and if I add any number to the end should give a 404 error. I have managed to find these 2 issues but I am not sure what else could be wrong with the code. Would you be able to look into this? And possible tell us what else is incorrect? I really like the design and we worked really hard on this for almost 5 moths but I want to make sure that when we launch the new site it does not tank our rankings and only helps us in a positive way. Thanks in advance, Davit
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website?
Hi, Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
SEO Question re: Keyword Cannibalization
I know about Keyword Cannibalization, so I understand why it's generally a problem. If you have multiple versions of the same page, Google has to "guess" which one to display (as I understand it, unless you have a SUPER influential page you won't get both pages showing up on the SERP). To explain why I'm not sure if this applies to our page, we have a blog that we write about employment law issues on. So we might have 20 blog posts over the past year that all talk about recent pregnancy discrimination lawsuits employers might be interested in. Now, searching the Google Keyword tools, there aren't even close to 20 different focus keywords that would make any sense. "Pregnancy Discrimination lawsuit" is niche enough for us to be competitive, but anything more specific than that simply has very little search activity. My suggestion is to just optimize all of them for "pregnancy discrimination lawsuit". My understand of how Panda works is that if the content is different on each page (and it is!) then it will only display what it guesses is the most relevant "NLRB" post, but any link juice sent to the other 19 "NLRB" posts would still boost the relevancy for whatever post Google chooses. And it wouldn't get dinged as keyword stuffing because it's clearly not just the same page repeated over and over. I've found quite a few articles on Keyword Cannibalization but many are pre-Panda. I was CERTAIN I'd seen a post that explained my idea is a totally viable and good one, but of course now I can't find it. So before I go full steam ahead with this strategy I just want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CEDRSolutions0 -
Negative SEO and big decrease in main keyword ranking
Hi about 4 months ago, I had ranking #1 to #4 for "SEO" in Persian in my country; but someone made about 1000 spam links to my site and some other industry sites. I disavowed the links when I see (after 2-3 days of OSE detection). But now I'm in the page 2 of rankings for the most important keyword I ever had. The point is, My visits increased in this months, but I lost my rankings for this keyword not others. The spammy links targeted my main keyword. Whats you idea to get my ranking back? I'm writing content about SEO, Marketing and blogging for about 4 years and I don't have any bad resume in buying links or stuffing keywords or ... All natural.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masoudfatemi0 -
SEO vs 301
I have a website about "Download of games" and im planning open one about "games online" i know that "games online" its super hard to get good ranks, soo im thinking and do a 301 from my website of "download games" to my new website, do you think that is a good strategy ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nafera21 -
I am working SEO on a website that has 2 pages for different variations of a keyword.
I have run into a situation where a website has 2 pages for different variations of a keyword. I personally like to use 1 page and make it powerful for a variety of variations of that keyword. Unfortunately for the site I’m working on, using only one page is not an option. Here is an example: They have a page for “Alex Miley Cameras” and then they have a page for “Alex Miley Cell Phones”. On the first one they want to rank for Alex Miley & Alex Miley Cameras. For the 2<sup>nd</sup> they want to rank for “Alex Miley Cell Phones”. My concern is will Google be indecisive on which page to rank for the keyword “Alex Miley” since they both contain this word. Also, will it affect any of the other words and spread the juice making each page weaker. I would appreciate advice on how to rank these pages each separately for their keywords and not have to worry about any confusion from Google. I can’t change the structure of the site. I only have access to the Meta info and page content. Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOPresident0 -
Web site Migration from one server to another does cause any impact in SEO rankings?
Dear Seomoz members, We are going to migrate our website to different server location(new data center). does this impact on our SEO rankings? If so what and all checklist i have to do....to retain my SEO rankings. Regards, kathiravan subbiah Caratlane.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kathiravan0 -
Targeting Keywords at Home page or 301 URL?
Background info This is a new site and I am using Wordpress for a CMS not a blog and I have set a static page as the home page. The problem is when I configure the home page as a static page in wordpress it sets a 301 redirect to that page, which is this domain.com/software-consultancy (so the software-consultancy page is now domain.com). I thought about creating a separate Home page but I didn't see the point as the pages would be almost identical. **"Should I target keywords to the home page?" ** If I start link building using the phrase "software consultancy" to the home page should I link to domain.com or the 301 redirect URL domain.com/software-consultancy ? My thoughts are that if the URL has the keywords I am targeting in it will help with SEO. Or should I create a separate home page and just link the company name back to the home and have a separate page for "software consultancy" my thought is that having exactly what the company does on the home page would be better. But I don't want to lose out on search engine traffic by not having the keywords in the URL I am going to be link building for. I guess if I link build to the 301 redirect URL I can always revert back to this URL if I want to change? FYI here is my site structure: The site is for a small software consultancy and I have the following structure: domain.com/software-consultancy -- (Set as Wordpress static Page so essentially a 301 redirect to / ) domain.com/software-consultancy/areas domain.com/software-consultancy/areas/london domain.com/software-consultancy/areas/new-york I would really appreciate some feedback on this, even if it's experience / advice and there is no exact answer. Many Thanks, J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0