Seeking URL Advice
-
Hey Moz Community,
I'm looking for some URL structure advice for a new directory of a website. We're trying to rank for the term 'internships abroad in <country>'</country> We have roughly 100 pages targeting specific countries.
Right now the URL structure is www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/china, but some of my colleagues believe this structure would be better: www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/intern-in-china. I personally prefer the shorter structure, but we couldn't come to any agreement so we thought we'd pose the question to the community.
Any thoughts?
Thanks!
-
Thanks for the correction Keri. You are absolutely correct and I fixed my reply based on your sharp eyes
-
Thanks again for your feedback!
These pages are all pretty new (4 weeks tops), but we are aware of the link juice issue. Our purposed solution has been to create a page that lists all of our country pages (approx. 125) and have this page linked to from our homepage. Hopefully Google can then get from our homepage to all of our country pages in two jumps.
Sound?
-
I would go with the shorter URL structure in this case (http://www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/china) and use on-page key term targeting (as stated above) to help with semantic definition of the page content.
I noticed that none of the country specific pages have Page Authority (using SEOmoz toolbar) -- I'm not an expert on Drupal so not sure if the pages are brand new (they all have very recent cache dates and don't show up in the Internet Archive) -- or if the 'CTools jump menu' is preventing link juice from passing which will be difficult getting them to rank (unless they receive inbound links at some point).
-
Thanks, Anthony, for your response. Just to clarify how our CMS works, however, internships-abroad is actually a subdirectory of gooverseas.com. Removing the slash is not possible in this situation.
Does this alter your advise?
Thanks!
-
Ryan, I presume you didn't mean to include a space between internships and abroad, and that the primary recommendation should read mysite.com/internships-abroad/china?
-
Hi Andrew -
Shorter URLs generally out perform longer URLs. Also, fewer directories or file paths in he URL makes it easier to distribute link juice to the detail pages throughout the site (this necessitates a fairly flat file structure though and may not be the right solution for larger sites with diverse content, products & information requiring more complex taxonomies - this doesn't seem to be necessary in your case however).
I would suggest www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad-china ... you get your keyword phrase in the URL with an economy of words in the process - leaving out '-in-' will save 4 character spaces. You can make up for this in your on-page key term targeting using meta tags, H1's, etc to create the semantic drill-down.
TY
-
I'm looking for some URL structure advice for a new directory of a website. We're trying to rank for the term 'internships abroad in <country>'</country>
My primary recommendation is:
mysite.com/internships-abroad/china
The above URL is a logical structure. You have one page for each country. You also can offer a category page providing general information such as general advice applicable to anyone considering an internship in another country. The URL has relevancy for your keywords, your site structure and readers. It's not spammy as keywords are not repeated.
Another URL structure that works is:
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
-
Url too long
Hi we have a wordpress website for Office Furniture Our domain name does not have office furniture in it. So we went from having domain.com/shop/category/second-sub-cat to domain.com/office-furniture/category/second-category However we now have 509 products flagged with too long urls I am wondering whether we should change back : For example domain.com/office-furniture/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks Should I go back to domain.com/shop/office-corner-desks/beech-corner-desks Or am I going to confuse matters even more? I should say this only affects categories as the products themselves are /shop/product I am just concerned that changing the re-direct in place originally will just make matters worse and confuse things - would I get more value changing back? Or should I stick with it and just try to shorten urls individually by product titles etc
On-Page Optimization | | KellyDSD860 -
Advice for grouping short content briefs?
We have an engineering website (chemengonline.com) that publishes regularly, including content from our print magazine. In the magazine we have a section called "Chementators" where we highlight new innovations in chemical engineering. These are typically briefs and are often unique from one another. Last year we would group these briefs on a page like this http://www.chemengonline.com/november-chementator-briefs-5/. We recently relaunched our website and in the process decided to break the briefs apart into their own articles like this http://www.chemengonline.com/metal-free-atrp/. Considering the short length of the briefs but technical nature of the content, would you advise keeping them separate or going back to the old way of grouping them together on the same page? And if we group them, could you offer some advice on page title... Ex. "Chementators for February 2015" vs "Chementators - Graphene, Clean Power, Large Scale CCS, Nanoparticles, etc"
On-Page Optimization | | accessintel0 -
Www.colourbanners.co.uk/ & colourbanners.co.uk showing up as two seperate URLs - is this going to be dupliacte content issue?
Hi Guys, I have just created a report in Moz and there appears to be 91 duplicate content issues with the site which i need to fix as i think it could be the reason why we are suffering from a penalty. One of the main questions i have is these 3 variations of the URL http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/ http://colourbanners.co.ukhttp://colourbanners.co.uk/Each have links pointing to them. My question is, could this be causing a dupe issue?regardsGerry
On-Page Optimization | | gezzagregz0 -
Sorry, but that URL is inaccessible
Our site is all on the https protocol so every time I use the on-page grader it tells me the link is unavailable. What can we do? When I use the http protocol (which is 301 redirected to the https) it still gives me the same message.
On-Page Optimization | | whiskeyfl1 -
URL contain special character
Hello, I am using URLs which contain special character such as ', ". I found in the Google Webmaster Tool report errors related URL contain ' character. Google have indexed partial URL from beginning to ' character and cut off the rest of URL. For example: I submitted URL www.example.com/vietnam-visa-corp'-test-page.html, then google report error NOT FOUND for URL www.example.com/vietnam-visa-corp I don't know why and how to fix it? Please help! Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh1 -
Can we listed URL on Website sitemap page which are blocked by Robots.txt
Hi, I need your help here. I have a website, and few pages are created for country specific. (www.example.com/uk). I have blocked many country specific pages from Robots.txt file. It is advisable to listed those urls (blocked by robots.txt) on my website sitemap. (html sitemap page) I really appreciate your help. Thanks, Nilay
On-Page Optimization | | Internet-Marketing-Profs0 -
Question about URLs
Hello! I have a client that wants to upload an URL like this: www.example.com/keyword/page-name.html The main problem is that www.example.com/keyword/ doesn't exist and gives a 404 error so I'd prefer not doing that...... What do you think about this? And if the client wants to go ahead, is there any solution? A 301 to the final page would help? Thank you in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | Juandbbam0 -
Does google treat all urls equal?
Sorry for the lame title, i couldn't think of a better one. I want to know if google treats this: http://www.domain.com/products/some-product-name the same as it would treat: http://www.domain.com/?products=some-product-name if not, could you tell me the differences?
On-Page Optimization | | adriandg0