The URL Inside
-
Howdy SEO'ers,
I have a quick question for the SEO gurus out there.
When constructing "better" search friendly URLs would one of these be better than the other?
Example 1:
http://Domain.com/Category/Sub-Category/Product-name
Example 2:
http://Category.Domain.com/Sub-Category/Product-name
In this example the category could be phones and the sub-category brands of phones.
Is either one of these URLs "better" than the other in terms of ranking?
Thanks!
I'll hang-up and listen to your answer.
Jonathan
-
Mystripping the category is "safer", because I've seen so many eCommerce that assign a product to more then 1 category. This causes at least 2 urls with the same content... Duplication with all the risks dupes have for a site health.
-
I agree with Gianluca and for the reasons he provided.
Alan, I could not get the URL link you shared to work, but it seems Matt is directly referring to the crawling and indexing of the page, not the ranking.
The ranking of the page has much greater potential on an established site with DA rather then on a sub-domain which does not have the DA of the main site.
The only part of Gianluca's advice which seems debatable is whether or not to include the category in the URL. I am sure you will find solid SEO reasons to support both methods.
-
Gianluca is absolutely correct. Example one (main site) is much better. Subdomains were used by spammers many years ago and are no longer a good strategy.
For every subdomain you make for each product you're basically creating a separate site too which needs to be put into GWMT seperately, so that gets a little crazy. It's just not a good strategy, even when someone wants to create a blog only for their site I tell them to put it under the main domain for PR and Google webmster compliance reasons, and you're talking about creating dozens of subdomains. There is only downside to doing it that way.
Good luck
-
I would have to disagree
Matt Cutts December 10, 2007 at 10:48 am
<dd class="comment byuser comment-author-matt-cutts bypostauthor even thread-even depth-1">
“Which one is to be expected to be indexed and show on Google first; subdomain or subdirectory?”
Harith, to the best of my knowledge neither one has an advantage for crawling/indexing first.
</dd>
OK its old, but i could not find any metion after that date.
What i think is important is if the appear to be diffrenct sites, this can be the same for subdirectories -
Discard the subdomain option, because it's a link building killer. A subdomain is an independent site for the search engine respect the main domain, therefore you would have to do X link building campaign for the X category of product you have. Then all the link gained by a subdomain would not have ranking value for the others, because they a different sites. Therefore, for categories, the best is: www.domain.com/category. For the product page the best is always to strip the categories and subcategories from the URL: www.domain.com/product. This diminishes a lot the risk of duplication content, that can appear when you assign a product to more than category or subcategory.
-
This question has been asked many times, and i would say that they are the same if linked well. i would cross link them so that they do not look like seperate sites.
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
-
Keyword repeats/presence in url's & over-optimisation
Hi I'm about to launch a redesigned site and worried about overdoing kw presence on-page, primarily using in url's since will already be using kw in titles as well as page content. What's current thinking re over optimisation: If kw is in titles and page content is it best not to repeat again in url structure i.e. less is more, even though this will cause things like SeoMoz on-page grade score to fall, or better to keep them/add them ? Personally i think it makes sense to include kw in url again since helps make the page relevant, and so long as matches the content should help as opposed to hinder rankings for the pages target keyword. However when i look into this some say don't do this since is over-optimisation The sites generally ranking quite well for its target kw which i obviously don't want to lose after re-launch & hopefully improve further, in the case of this example they are 'Sports Centre Services' & 'Sports Centre Equipment Rental'). The sites current url structure is similar to this below example: frankssportscentres.com/services/sports-centre-equipment-rental Would it be better to keep following existing/above format or to go with either of the below options i.e. more kw rich urls or less: frankssportscentres.com/sports-centre-services/sports-centre-equipment-rental Or frankssportscentres.com/sports-centre-services/equipment-rental Or even less frankssportscentres.com/services/equipment-rental Many Thanks in advance for any helpful comments Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Blog URL
I know that this question has been asked in the past, and that website.com/blog is better for seo purposes than blog.website.com. We want to setup a custom blog on our site, using Wordpress. Our designers/host are telling us that buy using website.com/blog can causes issues b/c Wordpress is open source, and our site could be hacked? Is there anything we should do about this? Any suggestions? Any Advice appreciated!!! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | TP_Marketing0 -
Directory site with an URL structure dilemma
Hello, We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp). Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages. While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’. One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest. I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant. My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them. My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content. With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts. This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely. Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way? Many thanks, Andras
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
How do I get this program to see url with www. and with out www the same
The program is showing pages with www. as a differant page from a page with out the www. first, this is showing up as duplicate pages when they are the same page, how do I filter this?
On-Page Optimization | | masterplumbertom0 -
Search engine friendly URLs
I'm going to create some new content for my site, I'm trying to decide on the best search engine friendly format. Namely, is it ok to use a subdirectory or should I keep all content on root level? Is the SEO effect of either of these URLs superior to the other? domain.com/cooking/lasagna.php vs domain.com/lasagna.php
On-Page Optimization | | limens0 -
3 Different Home Page URL's Being Indexed?
Hello Everyone! I own a dog supplies eCom site on the x-cart platform. I recently upgraded to 4.4 version about 3 weeks ago and am noticing 3 different home page URL's getting indexed and ranked: /
On-Page Optimization | | k9byron
/home.php
/home.php?cat= I dont know why this is happening and I dont claim to be an expert SEO but know this cant be good! I am seeing high rankings on certain terms for all 3 URL's. Has anyone seen this before and can anyone give me any feedback on this and how it may be effecting my sites ranking in the future? Thanks in advance!
Byron-0 -
Absolute vs Relative URLs
What are the pros and cons of these two types of URLs and what type of weight does this hold. It doesn't seem to be a big issue in regards to ranking. Any qualified clarity would help.
On-Page Optimization | | Romancing0 -
2 URLs, same content, 1 with keywords. Does this hurt me?
I'm in the process of adding some new features to our site and have a question about our URLs. Most of our URLs consist of either sitename.com/contentname or sitename.com/content/contentid I'm in the process of building a directory to those pages. The directory has a number of filters which will ultimately point to the destination page. sitename.com/filter1/filter2/contentid or sitename.com/filter1/filter2/contentname The destinations will have references. From an SEO perspective, I would think I want the filter1/filter2 version of the link indexed since this will add keywords that someone might search for. However, since the filters are dynamic, if someone just searches for contentname I would want to have sitename.com/contentname returned in the search results. Do I get any SEO benefit out of building those filter links as described if they are not the canonical links?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeCotellese810