URL restructure and phasing out HTML sitemap
-
Hi SEOMozzies,
Love the Q&A resource and already found lots of useful stuff too!
I just started as an in-house SEO at a retailer and my first main challenge is to tidy up the complex URL structures and remove the ugly sub sitemap approach currently used. I already found a number of suggestions but it looks like I am dealing with a number of challenges that I need to resolve in a single release.
So here is the current setup:
The website is an ecommerce site (department store) with around 30k products. We are using multi select navigation (non Ajax). The main website uses a third party search engine to power the multi select navigation, that search engine has a very ugly URL structure. For example www.domain.tld/browse?location=1001/brand=100/color=575&size=1&various other params, or for multi select URL’s www.domain.tld/browse?location=1001/brand=100,104,506/color=575&size=1 &various other non used URL params. URL’s are easily up to 200 characters long and non-descriptive at all to our users. Many of these type of URL’s are indexed by search engines (we currently have 1.2 million of those URL’s indexed including session id’s and all other nasty URL params)
Next to this the site is using a “sub site” that is sort of optimized for SEO, not 100% sure this is cloaking but it smells like it. It has a simplified navigation structure and better URL structure for products. Layout is similair to our main site but all complex HTMLelements like multi select, large top navigations menu's etc are all removed. Many of these links are indexed by search engines and rank higher than links from our main website. The URL structure is www.domain.tld/1/optimized-url .Currently 64.000 of these URL’s are indexed. We have links to this sub site in the footer of every page but a normal customer would never reach this site unless they come from organic search. Once a user lands on one of these pages we try to push him back to the main site as quickly as possible.
My planned approach to improve this:
1.) Tidy up the URL structure in the main website (e.g. www.domain.tld/women/dresses and www.domain.tld/diesel-red-skirt-4563749. I plan to use Solution 2 as described in http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck to block multi select URL’s from being indexed and would like to use the URL param “location” as an indicator for search engines to ignore the link. A risk here is that all my currently indexed URL (1.2 million URL’s) will be blocked immediately after I put this live. I cannot redirect those URL’s to the optimized URL’s as the old URL’s should still be accessible.
2.) Remove the links to the sub site (www.domain.tld/1/optimized-url) from the footer and redirect (301) all those URL’s to the newly created SEO friendly product URL’s. URL’s that cannot be matched since there is no similar catalog location in the main website will be redirected (301) to our homepage.
I wonder if this is a correct approach and if it would be better to do this in a phased way rather than the currently planned big bang?
Any feedback would be highly appreciated, also let me know if things are not clear.
Thanks!
Chris
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
-
Indexed, not submitted in sitemap
I have this problem for the site's blog
Technical SEO | | seomozplan196
There is no problem when I check the yoast plugin setting , but some of my blog content is not on the map site but indexed. Did you have such a problem? What is the cause? my website name is missomister1 -
Url folder structure
I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature _
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes.
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.0 -
XML Sitemap and unwanted URL parameters
We currently don't have an XML sitemap for our site. I generated one using Screaming Frog and it looks ok, but it also contains my tracking url parameters (ref=), which I don't want Google to use, as specified in GWT. Cleaning it will require time and effort which I currently don't have. I also think that having one could help us on Bing. So my question is: Is it better to submit a "so-so" sitemap than having none at all, or the risks are just too high? Could you explain what could go wrong? Thanks !
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
Friendly URL
Can be Friendly URL installed on a custom made jobsite using mod rewrite / apache without any big interference to the system itself? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | tomaz770 -
Correct Redirect method for switching pages from .html to /pretty urls/
I have a customer that has all his site files as .html extensions and i'm going to rebuild this site into a wordpress site for easier management, regarding the new permalink structure, should i just do a 301 redirect on this?
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
URL paths and keywords
I'm recommending some on-page optimization for a home builder building in several new home communities. The site has been through some changes in the past few months and we're almost starting over. The current URL structure is http://homebuilder.com/oakwood/features where homebuilder = builder name Oakwood Estates= name of community features = one of several sub-paths including site plan, elevations, floor plans, etc. The most attainable keyword phrases include the word 'home' and 'townname' I want to change the URL path to: http://homebuilder.com/oakwood-estates-townname-homes/features Is there any problem with doing this? It just seems to make a lot of sense. Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mikescotty0 -
A sitemap... What's the purpose?
Hello everybody, my question is really simple: what's the purpose of a sitemap? It's to help the robots to crawl your website but if you're website has a good architecture, the robots will be able to crawl your site easily! Am I wrong? Thank you for yours answers, Jonathan
Technical SEO | | JonathanLeplang0 -
Sitemap with links and images together
Hi there, my e-commerce platform (Magento with "Mageworx SEO Enterprise" plugin) is generating an sitemap.xml that mix text (links) and images, and the result is something like that: <url><loc>http://www.e-lustre.com.br/abajur/abajur-keops</loc>
Technical SEO | | e-Lustre
<lastmod>2011-04-10</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
image:imageimage:lochttp://www.e-lustre.com.br/catalog/product/image/size/250x250/e/-/e- lustre_mantra_0030_grande.jpg</image:loc></image:image></url> WebmasterTools accepts it, but recognize it as an image sitemap. Have you seen that kind of sitemap, and most important, do you think that's a problem ? Full file: http://www.e-lustre.com.br/sitemap.xml0