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
-
You're welcome. As you might have guessed, I've tackled this problem myself a few times!!
-
Ok, this is something I can take as homework.
Thank you for having checked my issue in details.
-
It's painful, but that is your answer:
Q. Why isn't google ranking these pages better?
A. Because they are not unique or usefulGoogle can be annoyingly smart like that. The cheapest/easiest fix is probably to have a paragraph added to the top of each page. So your /budapest/jatekbolt page would have a paragraph about the wonderful choice of restaurants available in budapest and it's rich culinary heritage. (queue affordably copywriter to help keep them different).
You could also consider adding a field to your business database for "recommended snippet" which if filled in highlights that listing and gives a more in depth amount of information. You could the have someone look at reviews for the listings in key categories, pick our favourites and write a fresh description to those featured businesses.
The result of that will be a page that has more unique content and is in fact slightly more useful, That puts you in good standing for improved rankings.
-
Your assumption is correct about the snippets.
We either use part of the business description or some of the actual review wording on the category pages.
While I understand the importance of your suggestion, that is all I have about these businesses, and I add these snippets to the lists, so that I could increase CTR through previews.
Yes, there is no original content, basically just 'copied contents' from several pages, so the category page is total duplicate to nothing, but not genuine either.
Thank you again for your help.
-
Actually, I would say that uniqueness probably is an issue. keep in mind that I don't speak Hungarian,but it looks like everything on that page is a snippet from the sub pages. ie none of the text on that page is unique to that page. Is that correct?
Adding unique content at category level, even just a few lines of natural text that include the main keywords can make quite a difference. I've found it much harder to rank category pages that do not have that.
That would probably be my first job. Even if you just did it on a sample set of pages and monitored those for any improvement. Making them useful (and therefore attracting links) might be harder.
-
My guess would be that the bigger problem is not the URL structure, but the content on those category pages. The change you propose to the URL structure is good in terms of helping the business listing pages and in creating a logical hierarchy, but it isn't going to help those category pages.
I'd start with looking at:
- Content of the category pages : Do they have unique content. Is that content useful in it's own terms?
- Internal linking of category pages : Are you linking back up to the categories from the businesses, are you linking down to them ok. Are those links close to the top of the site hierarchy?
- External links: Are you getting links from other websites to those pages (easier if they are useful)
- On page optimisation: Are the category pages themselves well optimised
I'd question whether there is any benefit at all to your category pages in changing the URL structure of your business pages. However if there is some it's impact will pale to nothing compared to the above.
-
Thank you for your reply.
Your suggestion matches the actual way of how we handle the issue right now.
I have thought, that we might be able to improve the process a bit, but I am happy, that there is no need to change the way of how it works now.
-
Ok, when the question starts it sounds real easy to me but down the question it become too complex that it makes me confused on how to answer...
For Business listing I think it’s best to go with http://www.example.com/biz/my-business-name
For category pages the URL should be like http://www.example.com/oh/car-parts (oh represents the city name while car parts in the category)
All categories should come in all states for example if a person in California looks for car parts the url should be http://www.example.com/ca/car-parts
Reason why you should adopt this structure...
- Duplicate content issue will be eliminated
- URLs will not be so long so there will be no indexing issues
- Even if a business selects the multiple categories the content will not be duplicated.
Hope this helps...
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
-
Creating a .cn site with the existing site content
Hi all, I'm planning to create a .cn site. If I simply translate the existing content on my site (.com.au) into Chinese, do you think Google will see the .cn site as a duplicate of the main site? Will this cause any duplicate content issues? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | QuantumWeb620 -
How to Structure URL's for Multiple Locations
We are currently undergoing a site redesign and are trying to figure out the best way to structure the URL's and breadcrumbs for our many locations. We currently have 60 locations nationwide and our URL structure is as follows: www.mydomain.com/locations/{location} Where {location} is the specific street the location is on or the neighborhood the location is in. (i.e. www.mydomain.com/locations/waterford-lakes) The issue is, {location} is usually too specific and is not a broad enough keyword. The location "Waterford-Lakes" is in Orlando and "Orlando" is the important keyword, not " Waterford Lakes". To address this, we want to introduce state and city pages. Each state and city page would link to each location within that state or city (i.e. an Orlando page with links to "Waterford Lakes", "Lake Nona", "South Orlando", etc.). The question is how to structure this. Option 1 Use the our existing URL and breadcrumb structure (www.mydomain.com/locations/{location}) and add state and city pages outside the URL path: www.mydomain.com/{area} www.mydomain.com/{state} Option 2 Build the city and state pages into the URL and breadcrumb path: www.mydomain.com/locations/{state}/{area}/{location} (i.e www.mydomain.com/locations/fl/orlando/waterford-lakes) Any insight is much appreciated. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | uBreakiFix0 -
Multiple Organization Schema on the same site
I creating a preferred supplier list on my site and wanted to use the Organization Schema for the company details. Is there a issue with having more than one org schema on the same site? or should I just use the one for my company. Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | gregdicksonuk1 -
Errors in URL´s
SEOMOZ is showing quite a lot of URL Errors like this: http://trampoliny.net.pl/akcesoria/pokrowiec-basic?frontend=1825cb1eea3af8ee6ee2d96617d32ff6 All these URL´s use the parameter "?frontend=". In webmaster tools we told google not to index this parameter. Unfortunately at the moment we cannot set this parameter as "NOINDEX". We also dont want to use a robots.txt file. How to get rid of the URLS in Seomoz?
On-Page Optimization | | drgoodcat0 -
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!
On-Page Optimization | | dunklea0 -
Best title tag structure?
Hi, In the below example, which one do you think would work best if any. The website is called greatshoes.co.uk (fictitious) The category is 'work shoes' and a page under this cat is lets say 'Size 9 work shoes' I tend to build my title tags like this: size 9 work shoes, cheap size 9 work shoes | greatshoes.co.uk BUT I have read on here it should be more like this: size 9 work shoes < work shoes | greatshoes.co.uk Does anyone think it would make a difference when targeting for the term 'size 9 work shoes' which title tag I use. Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper0 -
Site URL's
We are redeveloping our website, and have the option to amend URLs (with 301 redirects from old URL to new), so my question is: Would 'golfsite.com/golf-clubs' achieve superior rankings than 'golfsite.com/clubs' for the search term 'golf clubs' if all other factors were the same? Should the URL reflect the intended search term wherever possible?
On-Page Optimization | | swgolf1230 -
Best SEO structure for blog
What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings. Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article. I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about. I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic. I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article. Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)? Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0