How should you determine the preferred URL structure?
-
Hi Guys,
When migrating to a new CMS which include new pages how should you determine the URL structure, specifically:
- So should we include www. or without it?
- Should the URL have a trailing slash?
How would you determine the answer to these questions?
Cheers.
-
The URL structure should match the menu structure. This is beneficial to bots crawling your site.
You're two specific questions are open to discussion. I've heard pros and cons of both.
Traditionally it's include www with trailing slash only on directories
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
-
Redirecting a Few URLs to a New Domain
We are in the process of buying the blog section of a site. Let's say Site A is buying Site B. We have taken the content from Site B and replicated it on Site A, along with the exact url besides the TLD. We then issued 301 redirects from Site B to Site A and initiated a crawl on those original Site B urls so Google would understand they are now redirecting to Site A. The new urls for Site A, with the same content are now showing up in Google's index if we do a site:SiteA.com search on the big G. Anyone have any experience with this as to how long before Site A urls should replace Site B urls in the search results? I undestand there may be a ranking difference and CTR difference based on domain bias, etc... I'm just asking if everything goes as planned and there isn't a huge issue, does the process take weeks or months?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
Duplicate Content with URL Parameters
Moz is picking up a large quantity of duplicate content, consists mainly of URL parameters like ,pricehigh & ,pricelow etc (for page sorting). Google has indexed a large number of the pages (not sure how many), not sure how many of them are ranking for search terms we need. I have added the parameters into Google Webmaster tools And set to 'let google decide', However Google still sees it as duplicate content. Is it a problem that we need to address? Or could it do more harm than good in trying to fix it? Has anyone had any experience? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Url structure of a blog
We are trying to work out what the best structure for our blog is as we want each page to rank as highly as possible, we were looking at a flat structure similar to http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/ where every posts is after the blog/ but not in category's although the viewers can look in different category's from the top buttons on the page- photoshop - icons etc or we where going to go for the structured way- blog/photoshop/blog-post.html the only problem is that we will end up 4 deep at least with this and at least 80 characters in the url. any help would be appreciated. Thanks Shaun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Repeat name and location in URL or no ?
in this url www.stjeromemitsubishi.ca, is it a good thing to repeat the name and location in the url but with ''-''sign between? ex: www.stjeromemitsubishi.ca/partsandservice/stjerome-mitsubishi-contact.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidPilon0 -
Rewriting URL
I'm doing a major URL rewriting on our site to make the URL more SEO friendly as well as more comfortable and intuitive for our users. Our site has a lot of indexed pages, over 250k. So it will take Google a while to reindex everything. I was thinking that when Google Bot encounters the new URLs, it will probably figure out it's duplicate content with the old URL. At least until it recrawls the old URL and get a 301 directing them to the new URL. This will probably lower the ranking of every page being crawled. Am I right to assume this is what will happen? Or is it fine as long as the old URLs get 301 redirect? If it is indeed a problem, what's the best solution? rel="canonical" on every single page maybe? Another approach? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
How canonical url harm our website???
Even though my website has no similar/copied content, i used rel=canonical for all my website pages. Is Google or yahoo make any harm to my SERP's?? EX: http://www.seomoz.org is my site, in that i used canonical as rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.seomoz.org" to my home page like that similar to all pages, i created rel=canonical. Is search engine harm my website???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MadhukarSV0 -
Automatic redirect to external urls
Hi, there is a way to create a "bridge page" with automatic url redirect ( 302 ) without google penalization? In this moment, my bridge pages are indexed on google with title and description of the redirected page.. Thanks in advance. Mauro.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raulo790 -
Removing dashes in our URLs?
Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0