URL Structure for Study Guides
-
I'm creating study guides for various musicals, plays and operas. A few issues:
- I want to easily view in Google Analytics data for all study guides, data at the category level (musical,play, opera) and data for an individual show.
- I want urls to be as short as possible for usability purposes.
- Some show titles are the same for shows in different categories. For example, there is the play Romeo and Juliet but there is also an opera Romeo and Juliet.
- Each study guide contains multiple sections that will live on different URLs (overview, context, plot summary, characters)
What would be the ideal URL structure? Here's what I was currently thinking we should use:
/show/play/romeo-juliet/
/show/play/romeo-juliet/context
/show/play/romeo-juliet/plot
/show/play/romeo-juliet/characters
-
Thanks! I think we'll go ahead and remove /shows from the URL structure and use Advanced Segments in Analytics.
-
Absolutely, what you would do is create an advanced segment in Google Analytics which includes all of the show types. That will give the same info.
There is even an alternative if you want to have this in the old way in Google Analytics, you would overwrite the usual pageview and create a custom one. For example on this page: /play/romeo-juliet the normal pageview would be: ga('send', 'pageview'); if you would change it to: ga('send', 'pageview', '/show/play/romeo-juliet'); it would still record the view in the old way. As I said, I don't like creating custom pageviews for this purpose.
-
If I don't use the /shows subdomain, is there still a good way to see in Google Analytics how much traffic is going to the study guides in general, regardless of show type?
-
Hi Jason,
Why not do it shorter and use: /play/romeo-juliet and /opera/romeo-juliet so you would drop the /show/ part out of the URL? Then /play/ or /plays/ would be an overview of all plays. Besides that I think you did a great job for the URL structure. You've checked if these are the keyword most people look for: content, plot, characters, right?
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
-
Unsolved URL Crawl Reports providing drastic differences: Is there something wrong?
A bit at a loss here. I ran a URL crawl report at the end of January on a website( https://www.welchforbes.com/ ). There were no major critical issues at the time. No updates were made on the website (that I'm aware of), but after running another crawl on March 14, the report was short about 90 pages on the site and suddenly had a ton of 403 errors. I ran a crawl again on March 15 to check if there was perhaps a discrepancy, and the report crawled even fewer pages and had completely different results again. Is there a reason the results are differing from report to report? Is there something about the reports that I'm not understanding or is there a serious issue within the website that needs to be addressed? Jan. 28 results:
Reporting & Analytics | | OliviaKantyka
Screen Shot 2022-03-16 at 3.00.52 PM.png March 14 results:
Screen Shot 2022-03-15 at 10.31.22 AM.png March 15 results:
Screen Shot 2022-03-15 at 4.06.42 PM.png0 -
In google analytic for google /cpc it is showing url with 404 which even not exists in my database
Hello All, In google analytic for google /cpc it is showing url with 404 which even not exists in my database that also more than 300 per day. How can it is possible? it is showing /black-friday-offers but I don't have such page. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | pragnesh96390 -
Tool to check page size for multiple url's at once
In Google Analytics under Site Speed > Page Timings, you can see all pages and their loading time compared to the average. This is very handy to check which pages maybe need some optimization. I would also like to check the size for these pages in a similar way. There are multiple tools out there like GTmetix and Pingdom that give specific information and performance insights. The problem is that they are limited to check one url at a time. Does someone know about a tool to check the page size of multiple url’s at once (and if possible to easily export to Excel)? That way I can check which pages are big in size and research/optimize them. Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | Mark.0 -
How to get multiple pages to appear under main url in search - photo attached
How do you get a site to have an organized site map under the main url when it is searched as in the example photo? SIte-map.png
Reporting & Analytics | | marketingmediamanagement0 -
URL Formatting for Internal Link Tagging
After doing some research on internal campaign link tagging, I have seen conflicting viewpoints from analytics and SEO professionals regarding the most effective and SEO-friendly way to tag internal links for a large ecommerce site. It seems there are several common methods of tagging internal links, which can alter how Google interprets these links and indexes the URLs these links point to. Query Parameter - Using ? or & to separate a parameter like cid that will be appended to all internal-pointing links. Since Google will crawl and index these, I believe this method has the potential of causing duplicate content. Hash - Using # to separate a parameter like cid that will be appended to all internal-pointing links. Javascript - Using an onclick event to pass tracking data to your analytics platform Not Tagging Internal Links - While this method will provide the cleanest possible internal link paths for Google and users navigating the site and prevent duplicate content issues, analytics will be less effective. For those of you that manage SEO or analytics for large (1 million+ visits per month) ecommerce sites, what method do you employ and why? Edit* - For this discussion, I am only concerned with tagging links within the site that point to other pages within the same site - not links that come from outside the site or lead offsite. Thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | RobbieFoglia0 -
Landing page URL appearing as keyword
Hi Mozers, I've recently experienced the URLs of my key landing pages coming up as keywords. This has been on the rise since early July (when it was relatively insignificant) to the current position (see image below) where they make up the majority of my top keywords. Drilling down into a bit more detail, this seems to be almost exclusively Desktop traffic but in terms of Technology there are no clear standouts (seems to be mostly Windows OS and Chrome). Has anyone else been experiencing this?
Reporting & Analytics | | mopland0 -
URL Re-Structure - Tracking success of it
Hi guys, I was wondering what would be the best approach to track the success of a URL restructure? What we plan to do is to implement the URL re-structure slowly by only having it on new pages which go live for property listings. Any previous listings will use the old URL structure. I thought it would be best to limit any potential problems by testing it on a smaller number of pages. So my question really is, what metrics should I be looking at to determine the success of this given the fact that we remove any property listings once they get rented or sold?
Reporting & Analytics | | MarkScully0 -
What is the SEO Impact of Adding a Directory to URL
I would like to add a new directory named “products” for all of the product detail pages on my site. Instead of having the URL for a product be “mysite.com/product-details-page.aspx” we would like to change it to “mysite.com.com/products/product-detail-page.aspx.” I want to do this to enable us to add product pages to our traffic funnel analysis by filtering visits to the "product" directory - right now we can't track visits to product pages in the funnel because they are just one-off the main site. I know this change will require redirects for every single product. Is there anything else that needs to be done? My main question is, will this change negatively impact the SEO value of the product pages? We have several product pages ranking in the SERPs, and I don't know if pushing them one directory further will change that. Thanks for your input!
Reporting & Analytics | | pbhatt0