Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
SEO effect of URL with subfolder versus parameters?
-
I'll make this quick and simple. Let's say you have a business located in several cities. You've built individual pages for each city (linked to from a master list of your locations).
For SEO purposes is it better to have the URL be a subfolder, or a parameter off of the home page URL:
https://www.mysite.com/dallas which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/dallas/index.php
or
http://www.mysite.com/?city=dallas which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/index.php?city=dallas
-
Thanks Miriam, This is very helpful and makes a lot of sense. What do you think of towns and villages, or boroughs of a large city. Do you think the close proximity is dangerous territory re: keyword permutations?
I take your point about unique content tailored to the people of the city - it makes a lot of sense. But what about locations that are closer to each other?
I know it's a tricky question but any insight would be most welcome.
-
That's a good question, Andrew. It's true that it's no longer a best practice to build out a set of pages featuring slightly different permutations of a keyword (car repair, auto repair, repairing cars, fixing cars, etc.). That approach is now quite dated. Honestly, it never made any sense beyond the fact that when Google wasn't quite so sophisticated, you could trick your way into some additional rankings with this type of redundant content.
The development of location landing pages is different. These are of fundamental use to consumers, and the ideal is to create each city's landing page in a way that is uniquely helpful to a specific audience. So, for example, your store in Detroit is now having a special on winter clothing right now, because it's still snowing there. Meanwhile, your store in Palm Beach is already stocking swim trunks. For a large, multi-location Enterprise, location landing pages can feature highly differentiated content, including highlights of regional-appropriate inventory and specials, as well as unique NAP, driving directions, reviews from local customers, and so much more.
The key to avoiding the trap of simply publishing a large quantity of near-duplicate pages is to put in the effort to research the communities involved and customize these location pages to best fit local needs.
-
Hi Searchout,
Good for you for creating a unique page for each of your locations. I like to keep URLs as simple as possible, for users, so I'd go with:
etc.
From an SEO perspective, I don't think there's a big difference between root URLs and subfolders. If you're using one structure, I doubt you'd see any difference from doing it differently (unless you were using subdomains, which is a different conversation).
-
Of course that cities will be counted.
That´s why im always reinforcing the idea of creating UNIQUE and Special pages for each keyword.
Google is getting smarter and smarter, so simple variations in a few words are easly detected.Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR. -
Hi
Thanks for your response I'm interested in this too. I've been targeting cities with their own pages but I head recently that google are going to be clamping down on multiple keyword permutations. Do you think cities will be counted in this?
-
Hi there!
In my opinion, for SEO purposes it is correct to have a unique page (really different from other, not just changing the city name and location) por each big city you are optimizing.
Thus said, a subfolder is useful in order to show google the name of the city in the URL. It is common that google considers parameters different than folders.Also, remember to avoid duplicate content. /dallas/ and /dallas/index.php should not be accesible and indexable for google. Redirect one to the other or canonicalize one to the other. Same with www, non-www, http and https versions.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
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
-
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?
I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Why is rel="canonical" pointing at a URL with parameters bad?
Context Our website has a large number of crawl issues stemming from duplicate page content (source: Moz). According to an SEO firm which recently audited our website, some amount of these crawl issues are due to URL parameter usage. They have recommended that we "make sure every page has a Rel Canonical tag that points to the non-parameter version of that URL…parameters should never appear in Canonical tags." Here's an example URL where we have parameters in our canonical tag... http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/womens-costumes/ rel="canonical" href="http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/womens-costumes/?pageSize=0&pageSizeBottom=0" /> Our website runs on IBM WebSphere v 7. Questions Why it is important that the rel canonical tag points to a non-parameter URL? What is the extent of the negative impact from having rel canonicals pointing to URLs including parameters? Any advice for correcting this? Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Solid_Gold1 -
Replace dynamic paramenter URLs with static Landing Page URL - faceted navigation
Hi there, got a quick question regarding faceted navigation. If a specific filter (facet) seems to be quite popular for visitors. Does it make sense to replace a dynamic URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants.html?a_type=239 by a static, more SEO friendly URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants/levis-pants.html by creating a proper landing page for it. I know, that it is nearly impossible to replace all variations of this parameter URLs by static ones but does it generally make sense to do this for the most popular facets choose by visitors. Or does this cause any issues? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennovators0 -
If I own a .com url and also have the same url with .net, .info, .org, will I want to point them to the .com IP address?
I have a domain, for example, mydomain.com and I purchased mydomain.net, mydomain.info, and mydomain.org. Should I point the host @ to the IP where the .com is hosted in wpengine? I am not doing anything with the .org, .info, .net domains. I simply purchased them to prevent competitors from buying the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman0 -
Is CloudFlare bad for SEO?
I have been hit by DDoS attacks lately...not on a huge scale, but probably done by some "script kiddies" or competitors of mine. Still, I need to take some action in order to protect my server and my site against all of this spam traffic that is being sent to it. In the process of researching the tools available for defending a website from a DDoS attack, I came across the service offered by CloudFlare.com. According to the CloudFlare website, they protect your site against a DDoS attack by showing users/visitors they find suspicious an interstitial that asks them if they are a real user or a bot...this interstitial contains a Captcha that suspicious users are asked to enter in order to visit the site. I'm just wondering what kind of an effect such an interstitial could have on my Google rankings...I can imagine that such a thing could add to increased click-backs to the SERPs and, if Google detects this, to lower rankings. Has anyone had experience with the DDoS protection services offered by CloudFlare, who can say a word or two regarding any effects this may have on SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterfish1 -
Ending URLs in .html versus /
Hi there! Currently all the URLs on my website, even the home page, end it .html, such as http://www,consumerbase.com/index.html Is this bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Is there any benefit to this? Should I remove it and just have them end with a forward slash?
If I 301 redirect the old .html URLs to the forward slash URLs, will I lose PA? Thanks!0 -
Do UTM URL parameters hurt SEO backlink value?
Does www.example.com and www.example.com/?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=Press+Release&utm_campaign=Google have the same SEO backlink value? I would assume that Google knows the difference.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mkhGT0