URL Structure Question
-
Am starting to work with a new site that has a domain name contrived to help it with a certain kind of long tail search.
Just for fictional example sake, let's call it WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com. The idea is that people might do searches for "what are the best restaurants in seattle" and over time they would make some organic search progress. Again, fictional top level domain example, but the real thing is just like that and designed to be cities in all states.
Here's the question, if you were targeting searches like the above and had that domain to work with, would you go with...
whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle-washington
whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/washington/seattle
whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle
whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/what-are-the-best-restaurants-in-seattle-wa
... or what and why?
Separate question (still need the above answered), would you rather go with a super short (4 letter), but meaningless domain name, and stick the longtail part after that?
I doubt I can win the argument the new domain name, so still need the first question answered.
The good news is it's pretty good content.
Thanks... Darcy
-
take the new 4 letter domainname you can market and brand. Redirect the old domain as best and logical you can to the specific pages on the 4 letter domainname.
4 letters are much easy-er to market. usernames in twitter, facebook etc, and you can make xyxy seatle, xyxy newyork as branding or social handlers for local markets and stuf..
#marketing #branding #worlddomination
-
Thanks for the answers Richard, Tobey & Lesley. Good points all.
Another option is to repurpose a domain name/one page site (used to be 1000 pages) that has been up for a long time, gained a bunch of authority/links for a totally unrelated subject, had a tragic developer experience where it's old content and could be used for this project. Currently it's a one page placeholder. That old TLD is equally meaningless to the new subject matter and could be anything.
So, if the choice were new 4 letter meaningless .com TLD or old meaningless 13 letter domain name with links for its old purpose and lots of old pages gone, which would you prefer? Is it hard to get Google to see an old domain name as a new subject... any harder than establishing relevance through content etc for a new domain name?
Thanks... Darcy
-
If it's a new domain then I definitely wouldn't go with anything like WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com. I would rather go with besteat.com or bestin.com and I could rank those domains much easier too. Don't start with a long spammy domain, build a brand instead. New domains with keywords help very little these days.
Most of the words in your domain examples are 'stop words' and shouldn't even be in domain names. (Words like 'are-best-in'). Even if you had categories for states they still don't belong in the final url either. Example, whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle should still resolve to whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle Although you could still visit whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/ when you click on seatttle the url should rewrite to whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle
For longevity, quality, branding, trust, and non spammy purposes, I would build the site using clean short urls like the below made up examples. EMD's are all but dead, especially long ones like whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com
tastyeat.com/seattle/
bestin.com/seattle/
tastytown.com/seattle/
dinein.com/seattle/ -
Personally, I would go for something much shorter. Long domain names can appear spammy, and I believe are one of the spam metrics used by Moz in their spam score. The other problem with a long domain name is that pages and posts on your site may have titles which will be much too long to fit in a search engines search window, although you may be able to tweak this. You may well be better off having a very short domain name so that as new keywords come through which you want to target you can do this effectively without having too long a URL.
-
I would prefer this one, whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle It keeps the state ISO in the url for when you grow large enough that you start running into cities with multiple names. Plus people are lazy, they abbreviate states and I think that helps with using that url structure as well.
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
-
Http to https Canonical Question
Hello Fellow Moz Friends I have recently went from http to https for the website. Do I keep my canonicals at http or make all https? Will this affect ranking signals? Anything I should be looking out for? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carwrapsolutions0 -
URL structure with broad search phrase but specific intent
My question is regarding some difficult URL structure questions in an online real estate marketplace. Our problem is that our customers search behavior is very broad, but their intent very narrow. For IRL examples go to objektia (dot) se. Example: Lease commercial space Stockholm Is a usual search query, wherein the user searches for the **broad category **commercial space, in the geography of Stockholm. The problem is that their intent is actually much more specific, since: Commercial space === [Office, Retail, Industrial, Storage, Properties] I have previously asked the forum for help regarding the placement of products in our URL-hierarchy, in which I got some good answers. We chose to go the route of alternative #3, ie placing our products (real estate listings), directly beneath their respective category (neighborhoods). https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/placement-of-products-in-url-structure-for-best-category-page-rankings Basically we chose to have the following URL structure: Structure: domain.se/category/subcategory/product Example: domain.se/Stockholm/suburb-of-stockholm/specific-listing-12 Now the question is, how do we deal with the **space type **modifier in our URL structure. Nobody wants to see retail space when they are after office space, so our current search page solution (category page) is the following: Structure: domain.se/space-type/neighborhood/sub-neighborhood All space types: domain.se/commercial-space/neighborhood/sub-neighborhood Specific space type: domain.se/office-space/neighborhood/sub-neighborhood Now, the problem with our current solution in combination with our intent to move our product pages into this hierarchy, is that every product page will be (and is today) linking towards the specific type category. Our internal link network would be built around type categories that are extremely relevant from a UX standpoint, but almost worthless (surprisingly) from an organic traffic standpoint. Also, every search page (category page) for each space type would be competing for the same search broad search phrase. The alternative is to place the type modifier at the end of the URL: Category page type at the end: domain.se/neighborhood/sub-neighborhood/type Listing page (product page), type at the end: domain.se/neighborhood/sub-neighborhood/street-address/type/listing-12
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Viktorsodd0 -
Redirecting to Modal URLs
Hi everyone! Long time no chat - hope you're all well! I have a question that for some reason is causing me some trouble. I have a client that is creating a new website, the process was a mess and I am doing a last minute redirect file for them (long story, for another time). They have different teams for different business categories, so there are multiple staff pages with a list of staffers, and a link to their individual pages. Currently they have a structure like this for their staff bios... www.example.com/category-staff/bob-johnson/ But now, to access the staffers bio, a modal pops up. For instance... www.example.com/category-staff/#bob-johnson Should I redirect current staffers URLs to the staff category, or the modal URL? Unfortunately, we are late in the game and this is the way the bio pages are set up. Would love thoughts, thanks so much guys!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatrickDelehanty0 -
What is the best URL structure for categories?
A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Uppercase in URLs = Dupe Content
Hi Mozzers, My developers recently changed a bunch of the pages I am working on into all lower case (something I know ideally should have been done in the first place). The URLs have sat for about a week as lower case without 301 redirecting the old upper-case URLs to these pages. In Google Webmaster Tools, I'm seeing Google recognize them as duplicate meta tags, title tags, etc. See image: http://screencast.com/t/KloiZMKOYfa We're 301 redirecting the old URLs to the new ones ASAP, but is there anything else I should do? Any chance Google is going to noindex these pages because it seems them as dupes until I fix them? Sometimes I can see both pages in the SERPs if I use personalized results, and it scares me: http://screencast.com/t/4BL6iOhz4py3 Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
XML question - not finding all of the pages
When I run http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ on my site, it doesn't find all of my pages. The pages do not have any no follows in them (I thought that was the original problem). Has this happened to anyone else? What is the solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalops0 -
Automatic redirect to external urls
Hi, there is a way to create a "bridge page" with automatic url redirect ( 302 ) without google penalization? In this moment, my bridge pages are indexed on google with title and description of the redirected page.. Thanks in advance. Mauro.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raulo790 -
URL structure + process for a large travel site
Hello, I am looking at the URL structure for a travel site that will want to optimise lots of locations to a wide variety of terms, so for example hotels in london
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onefinestay
hotels in kensington (which is in london)
five star hotels in kensington
etc I am keen to see if my thought process is correct as you see so many different URL techniques out there. Or am i overthinking it too much? Lets assume we make the page /london/ as our homepage. we would then logically link to /london/hotels to optimise specifically for 'london hotels' We then have two options in my mind for optimising for 'kensington hotels': Link to a page that keeps /london/hotels/ in its URL to maintain consistency ie A. /london/hotels/kensington or should we be linking to: B. /london/kensington/hotels/ (as it allows us to maintain a logical geo-landing page hierarchy) I feel A is good as the URL matches the search phrase 'hotels in kensington' matches the order of the search phrase, but it loses value if any links find these pages with 'kensington' in the anchor text, as they would not really strengthen the 'kensington' hub page. /london/kensington Ie: i land on the 'kensington hotels' page and want to see more about kensington, then i could go from /london/kensington/hotels
to
/london/kensington quite easily and logically in the breadcrumb. I feel B. is the best option for now.. Happy to I am only musing as i see some good sites that use option A, which effectively pushes the location (/kensington/ to the end of the URL for each additional niche sub page, ie /london/hotels/five-star-hotels/kensington/) Some of the bigger travel sites dont even use folder, they just go:
example.com/five-star-hotels-in-kensington/ Comments welcome!!! Thanks0