What is your opinion on ideal url structure?
-
-
Hi Jessi,
If I had to pick one of the 3 options, I'd chose the first, simply because it's the shortest.
1. In general, out of all ranking correlations we know of, longer URLs tend to rank slightly lower than shorter ones. It's not a hugely significant factor, but neither is keyword usage in the URL, as recent correlation data has also shown.
2. Many webmasters believe that URLs without numbers tend to receive a higher CTR than URLs with numbers. That's because our eyes tend to glaze over numbers, and they have an auto-generated look and feel to them. Personally, if numbers are necessary, I'd put them as close to the end as possible.
3. Along the same lines, there is some belief in the SEO world that a shorter directory structure (fewer folders and backslashes) tend to perform better in search, as this creates a virtual flat architecture for Google to crawl. That said, the benefit from this is most likely small in relation to other factors.
Just my 2 cents. Hope this helps!
-
MIxed bag unfortunately but as I said, the big players use to have the #1 url structure and switched to the other....
http://zillow.com/homedetails/1949-19th-Ct-Jupiter-FL-33477/2118723028_zpid/
http://www.trulia.com/property/3087033383-1949-19th-Ct-Jupiter-FL-33477
http://www.movoto.com/real-estate/homes-for-sale/FL/Jupiter/1949-19th-Ct-435_R3288099.htm
http://www.homes.com/listing/167972690/1949_19th_Ct_JUPITER_FL_33477
-
Dashes / hyphens have been the preferred style for a while now. I'm not sure about them being separators or not, but as Zachary mentioned Matt Cutts from google mentioned dashes are best practice. What I would do is find the best sites in your industry and analyze what is working for them and not working. Dissect their site with the tools here on seomoz. A point of reference. Seomoz uses dashes not underscores.
-
underscores is a consideration in our case because, for example you have an address like 2345 south blue jay way... we dont care about people searching for blue jays we only care about people searching for 2345 south blue jay way. Not saying its correct, just saying its the reason for consideration.
-
Overall, the address is more of the keyword than the keyword i think in this case. And I think the keywords actual use as a organizational identifier is more important than the seo aspects on it, in our case at least as we would be targeting the address in general.
-
Not necessarily unproven.
The Google Webmaster Tools help article on URL structure still says to use dashes instead of underscores.
Matt Cutts' article from 2005 is dated, but also mentions to use dashes.
By definition an underscore is used to link words, and hyphens are used to join words or break them apart.
Why anyone would use underscores is beyond me, personally.
-
.... additionally, I was asking because the major real estate portals use to do have the #1 url structure and have all recently switched to the latter. @joel, I have read that hyphens are like word separators where underscores will group words together.
-
Your address should be in the meta tags.
-
The third one is best. Keywords should be before address and hyphens look better the underscores. Also it's unproven but there are those who believe hyphens are better for seo than underscores.
-
/co/denver/555-your-address-way/postid
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
-
Duplicate content w/ same URLs
I am getting high priority issues for our privacy & terms pages that have the same URL. Why would this show up as duplicate content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RanvirGujral0 -
URL Parameters
On our webshop we've added some URL-parameters. We've set URL's like min_price, filter_cat, filter_color etc. on "don't Crawl" in our Google Search console. We see that some parameters have 100.000+ URL's and some have 10.000+ Is it better to add these parameters in the robots.txt file? And if that's better, how can we write it down so the URL's will not be crawled. Our robotos.txt files shows now: # Added by SEO Ultimate's Link Mask Generator module User-agent: * Disallow: /go/ # End Link Mask Generator output User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
URL / sitemap structure for support pages
I am creating a site that has four categories housed in folders off of the TLD. Example: example.com/category-1
Technical SEO | | InterCall
example.com/category-2
example.com/category-3
example.com/category-4 Those category folders contain sub-folders that house the products inside each category. Example: example.com/category-1/product-1
example.com/category-2/product-1
etc. Each of the products have a corresponding support page with technical information, FAQs, etc. I have three options as to how to structure the support pages' URLs. Option 1 - Add new sub-folder with "support" added to string: example.com/category-1/product-1-support Option 2 - Add a second sub-folder off of the product sub-folder for support: example.com/category-1/product-1/support Option 3 - Create a "support" folder with product sub-folders: example.com/support/product-1 Which of these three options would you choose? I don't like having one large /support folder that houses all products. It seems like this would create a strange crawling and UX situation. The sitemap would have a huge /support folder with all of my products in it and the keywords in my category folders would be replaced with the word "support." Because I would rather have the main product pages ranking over any of the support pages (outside of searches containing the word "support"), I am leaning toward Option 2: example.com/category-1/product-1/support. I think this structure indicates to crawlers that the more important page is the product page, while the support page is secondary to that. It also makes it clear to users that this is the support page for that particular product. Does anyone have any experience or perspective on this? I'm open to suggestions and if I'm overthinking it, tell me that too. Thanks, team.0 -
What is the best practice to seperate different locations and languages in an URL? At the moment the URL is www.abc.com/ch/de. Is there a better way to structure the URL from an SEO perspective?
I am looking for a solution for using a new URL structure without using www.abc.com**/ch/de** in the URL to deliver the right languages in specific countries where more than one language are spoken commonly. I am looking forward to your ideas!
Technical SEO | | eviom0 -
Keyword in URL vs organization
I have a jobs site that currently has the following structure for jobs: www.site.com/jobs/openings/1234.html Categories used to be listed this way: www.site.com/jobs/openings/accounting But we changed it to: www.site.com/jobs/category/accounting Does it matter? Is one better than the other? The page title, heading, and description also have the word "openings" or "opening" in them.
Technical SEO | | cmp1010 -
Friendly URLs
Hi, I have an important news site and I am trying to implement user friendly URLs. Now, when you click a news in the homepage, it goes to a redirect.php page and then goes to a friendly url. the question is, It is better to have the friendly URL in the first link or it is the same for the robot having this in the finally url? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
301 an old URL with a ? in the URL?
I am redoing a site and the URL's are changing structure. The client's site was in magento and in the store they would get two URLs, for example: /store/categoryname/productname and /store/categoryname/productname?SID=dslkajsfdoiu947598whouieht983hg98 Do I have to 301 redirect both of these URL's to their new counterpart? Both go to the same content but magento seemed to add these SIDs into the navigation and Google has both versions in the index.
Technical SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Canonical for non-exist URL ?
Hi I have a website what has parameter URL. For example www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2 I want that search engine see my page URL as; www.example.com/toys/cars But this URL is not exist in my website. And when i externally enter this page it goes to 404 page. If i add canonical url as www.example.com/toys/cars to the page www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2, what happened ? Is the url at the serp change as www.example.com/toys/cars ?
Technical SEO | | SEMTurkey0