Wordpress Woocomerce Recommended SEO URL structure
-
Hi Mozzers !
Thanks for looking.
I have a new shop in development (http://www.vintageheirloom.biz), I'm now using WordPress & Woocommerce.
I've asked Woocommerce whether it is possible to remove the 'shop' and 'product-category' categories. They say it is, but it isn't recommended, it can slow site speed & create possible duplicate pages.
I'm wondering what seasoned SEO experts opinions are on my particular structure? I've heard that a flat structure is recommended, but ecommerce shops as I understand pose their own issues, so any feedback would be appreciated.. Here's some URL examples:
http://vintageheirloom.biz/shop/bags/ - this for the category bags
http://vintageheirloom.biz/product-category/bags/shoulder-bags/ - this for shoulder bags a child of bags category
http://vintageheirloom.biz/shop/2-55-bags/vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-2-55-bag/ - a product
The last URL contains the category 2-55 bags. The products name also includes the phrases 2-55 bag. Should this level of repetition be avoided or is it best to keep the whole phrase 'vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-2-55-bag/' for SEO purposes?
Thanks for any help you can give me around this issue!
Kevin
-
Glad it was helpful!
If you are going to have a true blog then that is enough in order to segment it out. Having the date in there can be helpful to compare the hits you are getting to old blogs vs newer blogs (i.e. how long your content is staying relevant).
If you are going to have other types of content such as shopping guides / product comparisons / etc that are more "timeless" pieces of content then you might want to think about the kinds of articles you are going to write and create prefixes that match those types of articles.
You could definitely do product guides and product comparisons in a blog but it can be harder to segment out if it is just "blog".
Hope that helps. Cheers!
-
Joshua,
Many thanks, that really is helpful.
When you mention a prefix for the blog, would simply adding blog be ok?
http://vintageheirloom.biz/blog/2013/08/vintage-heirloom-turns-4/
Thanks for the links I'm off to have a look !
Cheers !
-
Thanks Jon,
We get vintage bags, mostly unique but not always, e.g. we get several vintage Celine box bags over the year, so we do get duplicate titles and do need to add a serial number.
Biz is my dev area, but thanks for the info !
-
One thing to keep in mind with the urls is how you can segment them in analytics for easy data analysis. You want them to be semantic and pretty but also easily segmented. I would encourage you to think about how you will be able to segment your urls in analytics so that you can easily see patterns in how people are browsing the site and what types of pages are successful.
For instance we have the following url structures for brands, equipment, replacement parts, and a learning center.
- brand/[brand-name]
- equipment/type/[category] - for the categorization of equipment
- equipment/brand/[product] - for easy segmentation of products
- part/type/[category]
- part/brand/[part]
- learn/[cat]
- learn/article/[article-title]
This gives us a lot of flexibility in moving products around in the menu system without messing up urls while still being semantic, and allowing for easy segmentation in analytics. For instance, with this setup we can see if people prefer navigating by equipment catalog or by brand. It also allows us to easily pull out the learning center articles and all the visit we get to them to see how eCommerce only visits are doing.
One thing I would suggest with your blog is to have some kind of prefix that allows you to easily exclude those pages (or only include those pages) in analytics. If you simply go by year without a prefix it will be harder to segment out the data.
You should check out a mozinar that Moz did with Everett Sizemore that deals with a lot of these issues (he specifically talks about SEO and url structure).
Also, you probably have already seen this, but yoast's plugin for wordpress will allow you to remedy much of the duplicate content that wordpress can create.
Cheers!
-
You should ideally be able to write unique titles for every product and post without the need for serial numbers or dates to prevent duplication. But it won't do any harm to have the date in your post URLs if you want to.
I'd look at whether you can get a different domain to .biz as they aren't considered as trustworthy by web users.
-
Thanks for this Jon,
I tweaked the perma links and now have this for a product:
http://vintageheirloom.biz/shop/vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-2-55-bag/
It's a bit closer to the so named 'flat structure' and I think the URL still contains the reference that it is a 2.55 bag, hopefully this works. I'll get around duplications by adding a serial number or unique database number at the end.
We are blogging too so it might be worth keeping these categories, could avoid potential issues down the road.
I did notice I have a very flat structure for our blogs e.g.
http://vintageheirloom.biz/vintage-bamboo-gucci-bags/
This looks like it could lead to duplicates, so I've changed it to:
http://vintageheirloom.biz/2013/07/vintage-bamboo-gucci-bags/
Would you agree this is better?
Thanks
-
What you have looks fine to me, I don't think there will be an issue with repeating 2-55 bags in the product title as it would be useful for differentiating that bag from another bag of the same name that isn't a 2-55, eg vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-bag.
You could definitely remove the /shop/ or /product-category/ if your site is a shop and nothing else. If you have a blog, and want a 'bags' category then keeping /product-category/ might be preferable to avoid confusion and potential duplication.
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
-
Main Site and eCommerce Site URLs for SEO
My client currently has a main website on a url and an eCommerce site on a subdomain. The eCommerce site is currently not mobile friendly, has images that are too small and are problematic - and I believe it negates some of the SEO work we do for them. I had to turn off Google Shopping ads because the quality score was so low. That being said, they are rebuilding a shopping cart on a new platform that will be mobile friendly BUT the images are going to be tiny until they slowly replace images over several months. Would you keep the shopping cart on a subdomain, or make it part of the main website URL? Can it negatively impact the progress we have made on the main site SEO.
Technical SEO | | jerrico10 -
Should we change our URLs for SEO benefit?
Hi, I'm currently covering a maternity marketing role at i-escape and one our main objectives is to increase organic traffic to the website. i-escape has a selection of hand-picked boutique hotels, villas, lodges, guesthouses and apartments for people to discover and book. At the moment each hotel page URL follows this structure: https://www.i-escape.com/hotelname We'd like to change this to include some searchable words in the URL dependent on the type of hotel. For example: https://www.i-escape.com/boutique-hotels/hotelname or https://www.i-escape.com/boutique-apartments/hotelname If we do go ahead, we know we need to make sure all old style URLs canonically redirect to the new style. Is having the keyword in the URL important enough for us to change over 1500 URLs on the website? We have quite a high quality links pointing to these hotel pages URLs. Also, will this help us with navigation/user journeys/crawls as there will be a /boutique-hotels/hotelname rather than just /hotelname? Thanks so much all! Clair
Technical SEO | | iescape0 -
URL structuring / redirect question
Hi there, I have a URL structuring / redirect question. I have many pages on my site but I set each page up to fall under one of two folders as I serve two unique markets and want each side to be indexed properly. I have SIDE A: www.domain/FOLDER-A.com and SIDE B: www.domain/FOLDER-B. The problem is that I have a page for www.domain.com and www.domain/FOLDER-A/page1.com but I do NOT have a page for www.domain/FOLDER-A. The reason for this is that I've opted to make what would be www.domain/FOLDER-A be www.domain.com and act the primary landing page the site. As a result, there is no page located at www.domain/FOLDER-A. My WordPress template (Divi by Elegant Themes) forced me to create a blank page to be able to build off the FOLDER-A framework. My question is that given I am forced to have this blank page, do I leave it be or create a 302 or 307 redirect to www.domain.com? I fear using a 301 redirect given I may want to utilize this page for content at some point in the future. This isn't the easiest post to follow so please let me know if I need to restate the question. Many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | KurtWSEO0 -
Site Category structure detrimental to SEO?
Hi Guys, I am hoping that you may be able to help with an internal debate on whether our currently category structuring could be damaging from an SEO point of view. Our site sells t shirts primarily and as such we have a large product base of around 7000+ products. Our category structure currently works like so: Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/ Which I think is fairly typical, though this where it gets interesting, within this end category of "/TV/" there are around 120 categories that are used from a filtration point of view to contain items for each specific show etc, IE Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/Breaking_Bad, Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/Game_of_Thrones. The vast majority of these categories have between 1 and 3 products within them and the rest higher. Multiply this by the large amount of categories that we have on site and these end level "Band Title" categories amount to around 13,000+ categories in the directory. If at this point we put the filtration element aside, what is the communities opinion of the benefits or drawbacks of having the category structure like this? Thanks in advance for any feedback.
Technical SEO | | timsilver0 -
Personalization software and SEO
Hi guys, I'm just testing a personalization software in our website, basically changing the "location" text depending on the user's IP. I can see in my software that when the Google bot comes to our site the personalization software triggers an action changing the location based text to "California". Can this make Google understand that our website targets only users in California and thereof hurt our rankings in other locations nationwide? I'll appreciate your opinions.
Technical SEO | | anagentile1 -
Title Tags & Url Structure
So I'm working on a website for a client in the Tourism Industry. We've got a comprehensive list of museums & other attractions in a number of cities that have to go online. And we have to come up with the correct url structure, title tags and obviously content. My current line of thought was to work the urls in the following way. http://domain.com/type-of-attraction/city/name-of-attraction/ This is mainly because we think that the type of attraction is far more important then the city (SEO wise) as the country as a whole receives more searches, however we require a city in the url to make it unique because some attractions across cities happen to share names and we don't want to have the names of attractions littered with city names. However for title-tags I wanted to go the other way around, again due to the attraction type being more important then the city. Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction - City - Brand Name or Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction in City - Brand Name I am quite confident in working it this way; however I would appreciate if I receive some feedback on this structure, you think its good or you would make any suggestions / alterations. One last thing, There's the possibility of having many urls ending up with the same city names (For each type of attraction) I would think that just providing a list of links & duplicate text is not enough; would you suggest a canonical pointing to a link containing just information on the city? and using the other pages for user-navigation only? or should i set variables in the text which are replaced by the types of attraction so that the text looks different for each one?
Technical SEO | | jonmifsud0 -
Optimal Structure for Forum Thread URL
For getting forum threads ranked, which is best and why? site.com**/topic/**thread-title-goes-here site.com**/t/**thread-title-goes-here site.com**/**thread-title-goes-here I'd take comfort in knowing that SEOmoz uses the middle version, except that "q" is more meaningful to a human than "t". The last option seems like the best bet overall, except that users could potentially steal urls that I may want to use in the future. My old structure was site.com/forum/topic/TOPIC_ID-thread-title-goes-here so obviously any of those would be a vast improvement, but I might as well make the best choice now so I only have to change once.
Technical SEO | | PatrickGriffith0 -
URL content format - Any impact on SEO
I understand that there is a suggested maximum length for a URL so as not to be penalized by search engines. I'm wondering if I should if should optimize our ecommerce categories to be descriptive or use abbreviations to help keep the URL length to a minimum? Our products are segmented into many categories, so many products URL's are pretty long if we go the descriptive route. I've also heard that removing the category component entirely from a product URL can also be considered. I'm fairly new to all this SEO stuff, so I'm hoping the community can share their knowledge on the impact of these options. Cheers, Steve
Technical SEO | | SteveMaguire0