Should I change client's keyword stuffed URLs?
-
Hi Guys,
We currently have a client that offers reviews and preparation classes for their industry (online and offline). One of the main things that I have noticed is how all of their product landing page urls are stuffed with keywords. I have read changing url's will impact up to 25% traffic and to not mess with url's unless it is completely needed. My question is, when url's are stuffed with keywords and make the url length over 200 characters, should I be focusing on a more structured url system?
-
I find it impacts 22% of traffic actually.
-
Hi Eric,
This is a hard one, if H1 and the URL are the same and there is other issues with keyword stuffing then maybe look at changing it. I would never change URL's unless I 100% know that's the issue as it could give you more harm than good. If it's not hurting your client now I wouldn't change it. No point fixing something that's not broken in the way of rankings. From a click through point of view it doesn't help having a really long URL.
These two posts are really good about URL's. I hope this helps.
https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo
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
-
Ranking for keyword I don't optimize for & Other oddities
Hi Moz Community! I've been working with a clients website for about a year now. They were hit with the original Panda update because of some spammy links from a shady SEO firm. We've made a decent climb back but not a full recovery. There are some weird things happening that I would love some insight into. 1. Ranking for keywords we don't optimize for: I noticed some low keyword volume for a keyword term that is close to our main term, but is slightly different. We don't optimize for this term at all on our website. We rank third for this term, and actually show site links in the result, which doesn't happen for any of our other pages. 2. Index not found when doing site: search: Other oddity is that when you search site:www.mywebsite.com, I see all the pages within the site except the homepage. Not sure whats going on here, but when I fetch the homepage in GWMT, it returns the homepage. When you query the homepage by itself, it also ranks. Any help would be appreciated! Regards, J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artscienceweb0 -
Cleaning up backlinks and changing URLs
Currently we are performing very poorly in organic clicks. We are a e-commerce site with over 2000 products. Issues we thought plagued us: Copied Images from competitors Site wide duplicate content duplicate content from competitor site Number of internal links on a page (300+) Bad backlinks (2.3k from 22 domains and ips) being linked to from sites like m.biz URLs URLs are abbreviated, over 50% lack our keywords Lack of meta descriptions, or too long meta descriptions Current State of fixing these issues: 50% images are now our own Site wide duplicate content near 100% completed Internal links have been dealt with Rewrote content for every product 90% of meta descriptions are fixed From all of these changes we have yet to see increase in traffic...10% increase at best in organic clicks. We think we have penalties on certain URLs. My question for the MOZ community is what is the best way to attack the lack of organic clicks. Our main competition is getting 900% more clicks than us. Any more information you need on the topic let me know and will get back to you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
Problem: Magento prioritises product URL's without categories?
HI there, we are moving a website from Shoptrader to Magento, which has 45.000 indexations.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinetrend
yes shoptrader made a bit of a mess. Trying to clean it up now. there is a 301 redirect list of all old URL's pointing to the new one product can exist in multiple categories want to solve this with canonical url’s for instance: shoptrader.nl/categorieA/product has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product shoptrader.nl/categorieA/product-5531 has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product shoptrader.nl/categorieA/product¤cy=GBP has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product shoptrader.nl/categorieB/product has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieB/product, has canonical tag towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product shoptrader.nl/categorieB/product?language=nl has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieB/product, has canonical tag towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product Her comes the problem:
New developer insists on using /productname as canonical instead of /category/category/productname, since Magento says so. The idea is now to redirect to /category/category/productname and there will be a canonical URL on these pages pointing to /productname, loosing some link juice twice. So in the end indexation will take place on /productname … if Google picks it up the 301 + canonical. Would be more adviseable to direct straight to /productname (http://moz.com/community/q/is-link-juice-passed-through-a-301-and-a-canonical-tag), but I prefer to point to one URL with categories attached. Which has more advantages(?): clear menustructure able to use subfolders in mobile searchresults missing breadcrumb What would you say?0 -
I'm I being penalize? I fell off SERP for main keyword
I have been making minor changes to my site like fixing 404 pages and adding site maps etc. I have ranked as high as 3rd for the query 'private equity firms' but now Im showing the site around the 10th page and some times never. any ideas what could be going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nicktaylor10 -
Using abbreviations in URL - Matching Keyword
We have a website that uses /us/, /ca/, /va/, etc for URLs of the different U.S. states. How much better is it (or is it at all better) to use /california/ or /virginia/ instead in our URLs to rank for searches that include the name of those states?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Heydarian0 -
Adding index.php at the end of the url effect it's rankings
I have just had my site updated and we have put index.php at the end of all the urls. Not long after the sites rankings dropped. Checking the backlinks, they all go to (example) http://www.website.com and not http://www.website.com/index.php. So could this change have effected rankings even though it redirects to the new url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | authoritysitebuilder0 -
Changing Site URLs
I am working on a new client that hasn't implemented any SEO previously. The site has terrible url nomenclature and I am wondering if it is worth it to try and change it. Will I lose rankings? What is the best url naming structure? Here's the website http://www.formica.com/en/home/TradeLanding.aspx. (I am only working on the North America site.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
We are changing ?page= dynamic url's to /page/ static urls. Will this hurt the progress we have made with the pages using dynamic addresses?
Question about changing url from dynamic to static to improve SEO but concern about hurting progress made so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | h3counsel0