Categories and URL Structure - When to add a new directory?
-
I've been wondering this for quite awhile so I figured I should just ask.
Suppose my website has 5 categories and the url structure looks like:
do I also want to create a landing page for the above categories at the same URL depth as the homepage of the site?
OR what about:
www.mysite.com/category1/index.html
Which is a better way to do this?
Also, if your site began as fairly small and your 5 categories were your only other pages other than index, about, and contact pages (meaning you really had no reason to create separate directories), then as time passes, you decide to add 3 subcategory pages that would fit into a page: www.mysite.com/category1.html
would you add a folder with he same name as the html page, and then rename the html file as index.html and place it into the new folder?
-
I'm sorry, there was a typo in my question.. When I used the term "subdirectory" what I was actually referring to was a product page.
So, essentially what you are saying is that for my lowest URL depth where the website homepage is found, the only files there are going to be index?
-
Hi Bradley,
let's start with the first doubt... when you talk about a "landing page for the above categories", do you mean one landing for all 5 categories, or one landing page per category.
In the second case, the same /category1/, /category2/... should be treated and considered as landing pages.
In the first case, instead, your idea of having the landing on the same level of the architecture as the home page is formally correct, but - IMHO - it would be poor UX solution, because your are obliging the users to pass trough one possibly useless click in order to arrive to the category they are interested.
I also did not really understand your second question, but normally if you have to start adding subdirectories, than the URL of a subdirectory should be something like this:
www.domain.com/directory1/subdirectory2
as saying, you will add a second level of deepness in your navigational architecture.
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
-
Long url links
Just wondering about creating links.
On-Page Optimization | | Robotnik
Is it ok to have very long links?
Like: http://www.robotnik.com/computer-hardware-ram/8gb-ddr3-1600-desktop Is the above too long, is it better for SEO to be more to the point? Also For better SEO, is it better to use hyphens in a domain name or not?0 -
Content with changing URL and duplicate content
Hi everyone, I have a question regarding content (user reviews), that are changing URL all the time. We get a lot of reviews from users that have been dining at our partner restaurants, which get posted on our site under (new) “reviews”. My worry however is that the URL for these reviews is changing all the time. The reason for this is that they start on page 1, and then get pushed down to page 2, and so on when new reviews come in. http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser I’m guessing that this could cause for serious indexing problems? I can see in google that some reviews are indexed multiple times with different URLs, and some are not indexed at all. We further more have the specific reviews under each restaurant profile. I’m not sure if this could be considered duplicate content? Maybe we should tell google not to index the “new reviews section” by using robots.txt. We don’t get much traffic on these URLs anyways, and all reviews are still under each restaurant-profile. Or maybe the canonical tag can be used? I look forward to your input. Cheers, Christian
On-Page Optimization | | Christian_T2 -
Long URL's
So I'm super new at SEO and learning a lot. I'm a small business owner and enjoy doing it myself. Are long URL's good or bad? Like this: http://www.farnorthkennel.com/german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls/long-haired-german-shepherd-puppies-lava Is that too long? The german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls is an actual page with actual content. Do those hurt me?
On-Page Optimization | | Joshlaska0 -
URLs and folder structure for an E-commerce
Hi there !-) I´m helping a friend who has a e-commerce about nail polish in Brazil. I´m a little in doubt about the urls and folder structure. Two questions: 1. There are 10 products per category and 50 categories. Should I put them all in the root folder or creat 2 major categories ( 25 sub-categories each one)? 2. Whats the better product page url ( the store has around 500) nailpolish.com/IMPORT/BRAND/NAME-OF-THE-PRODUCT OR nailpolish.com/COMPLETE-NAME-OF-THE-PRODUCT Whats the best recomandation?
On-Page Optimization | | SeoMartin10 -
Mixing hyphens and underscores in a url
Hello. I am working on a site that was built with underscores in the urls, but only in the page names, not in the subdirectories. All the subdirectories have one-word names. So a typical url is "example.com/sub1/sub2/page_name." We would like to change the name of one of the subdirectories to a name that would be very useful for SEO, but this new name is a hyphenated word, let's call it "new-sub." If we changed "sub2" to "new-sub" then our url would have a mix of underscores and hyphens: example.com/sub1/new-sub/page_name. But if I used "new_sub" instead, google would read the words as connected with an underscore, instead of reading the subdirectory as a hyphenated word, which would be less useful for SEO. It seems like it might be a problem to have a hyphen in a subdirectory and underscores in the page names. But I want the SEO value of the hyphenated word. Any recommendations? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Which permalink structure should i use
Hi Im using wordpress for a trading market update site so most of the posts i add are time relevant... What permalink structure is best to use? Just /postname/ or /year/month/postname/ Thanks in advance! Chris
On-Page Optimization | | chrisleonard0 -
Should ".html" in the URL or not?
Does URL like /wedding-dresses.html/f/price/2,100 with "html" in the middle do harm to SEO? Should I drop the ".html"?
On-Page Optimization | | StevenRoland0 -
Is my H1 and H2 site structure proper?
If I have an h1 tag on the page that describes the purpose of the page, is it a bad idea to make all of the sub-headings h2 tags? A designer mentioned that it was frowned upon to make all of the secondary headings into h2 tags, or to use CSS to selectively style the heading tags.
On-Page Optimization | | dbuckles0