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
-
¿Disallow duplicate URL?
Hi comunity, thanks for answering my question. I have a problem with a website. My website is: http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1 (good URL) but i have 2 filters to show something and this generate 2 URL's more: http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1?show=true (if we put 1 filter) http://example.examples.com/brand/brand1?show=false (if we put other filter) My question is, should i put in robots.txt disallow for these filters like this: **Disallow: /*?show=***
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thekiller990 -
Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch
Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Simple Link Question
Hi Guys, I will appreciate if you answer 1 small question..... Will our site benefit from that link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
Valuable website related to our business ---nofollow link--> PDF Doc(on second site) ---link to our site ---> Kind Regards,
webdeal0 -
Search Refinement URLs
My site is using search refinement and I am concerned about the URL adding additional characters when it's refined. My current URL is: http://www.autopartscheaper.com/Air-Conditioning-Heater-Parts-s/10280.htm and when someone chooses their specific year, make, and model then it changes to: http://www.autopartscheaper.com/Air-Conditioning-Heater-Parts-s/10280.htm?searching=Y&Cat=10280&RefineBy_7371=7708. Will this negatively affect SEO for this URL? Will the URL be counted twice? Any help would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
Advanced Squidoo Question
Hi, I am looking for someone with a lot of experience with building links to your money site using Squidoo. I have a ton of squidoo lenses set up, i recently created back linking reports for a number of squidoos to see if the squidoo was appearing as a link. They were not. Only one out of my 53 lenses is appearing. Tons of them are already featured lenses ( Not work in progress) What does it take to get a squidoo to become an active link in a link profile? Thanks guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielblinman0 -
Renaming a URL
Hi, If we rename a URL (below) http://www.opentext.com/2/global/company/company-ecm-positioning.htm
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pstables
to http://www.opentext.com/2/global/products/enterprise-content-management.htm (or something similar) Would search engines recognize that as a new page altogether? I know they would need to reindex it accordingly, so in theory it is kind of a "new" page. But the reason for doing this is to maintain the page's metrics (inbound links, authority, social activity, etc) instead of creating a new page from scratch. The page has been indexed highly in the past, so we want to keep it active but optimize it better and redirect other internal content (that's being phased out) to it to juice it up even more. Thanks in advance!
Greg0 -
What Questions Should I Be Asking?
I just read a discussion that was originally posted by Steve Ollington on May 22, 2011 where he states that many people are asking the wrong types of questions on this forum. He said that he wonders if he will see a shift from people asking questions on "how to rank" to questions dealing with "how to work out the best KPIs" (Key Performance Indicators - yes I had to google it). I was once told we learn more by asking questions about a topic than by just listening. I've also been told that sometimes the right question to ask is, "What questions should I be asking?" So here is my question, what types of questions should I be asking to be better at SEO? Perhaps these are some of them: Is it possible to be good at SEO when it is not a full-time job? It is very tempting to look for easy answers when you only have limited time. What are considered KPI's? Are they different for every industry? How do you know what is junk information vs what is truly good SEO advice? Is it just simply trial and error? It seems to me that if people find truly good SEO information, they aren't going to be sharing it so easily. It's the whole, "You get what you pay for". Maybe some of you can tell me more of the questions I should be asking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadesmith1 -
Keyword Ranking Question
I have recently hired a SEO company to help with our keyword. My question is what are the best tools to use to verify what that are reporting. I can do an unpersonalized search, but I am likely still getting the my local results. I have been using the SEOmoz rank tracker in the past but for some reason it is not able to retrieve results over the past day or so. Are there any other good tools to check ranking for an exact url at the for non-localized, non personalized results? Thanks for the suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0