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
-
URL structure - Page Path vs No Page Path
We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
What should my main sitemap URL be?
Hi Mozzers - regarding the URL of a website's main website: http://example.com/sitemap.xml is the normal way of doing it but would it matter if I varied this to: http://example.com/mainsitemapxml.xml or similar? I can't imagine it would matter but I have never moved away from the former before - and one of my clients doesn't want to format the URL in that way. What the client is doing is actually quite interesting - they have the main sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml - that redirects to the sitemap file which is http://example.com/sitemap (with no xml extension) - might that redirect and missing xml extension the redirected to sitemap cause an issue? Never come across such a setup before. Thanks in advance for your feedback - Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
¿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 -
Content Audit Questions
Hi Mozzers Having worked on my companies site for a couple of months now correcting many issues, im now ready to begin looking at a content review, many areas of the site contain duplicate content, the main causes being 1. Category Page Duplications
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
e.g.
Widget Page Contains ("Blue Widget Extract")
Widget Page Contains ("Red Widget Extract")
Blue Widget Page Contains ("Same Blue Widget Extract")
Red Widget Page Contains ("Same Red Widget Extract") 2. Product Descriptions
Item 1 (Identical to item 2 with the exception of a few words and technical specs)
Item 2 Causing almost all the content on the site to get devalued. Whilst i've cleared all moz errors and warnings im certain this is causing devaluation of most of the website. I was hoping you could answer these questions so I know what to expect once i have made the changes. Will the pages that had duplicate content recover once they possess unique content or should i expect a hard and slow climb back? The website has never receive any warnings from Google, does this mean recovery for penalties like duplicate content will be quicker Several pages rank on page 1 for fairly competitive keywords despite having duplicate content and keyword spammy content. What are the chances of shooting myself in the foot by editing this content? I know I will have to wait for google to crawl the pages before i see any reflection in the changes, but how long after google has crawled the page should I get a realistic idea of how positive the changes were? As always, thanks for you time!0 -
Specific KW question...
Hi, I have this site: http://www.aerlawgroup.com. It's ranking very well overall for all targeted KWs. However, I have seen a drop for one main KW: "Los Angeles criminal defense attorney." It currently ranks #8 (it used to be as high as #2). What's interesting is that for similar (yet slightly less competitive KWs, he ranks much better - "Los Angeles Criminal Defense Lawyer." I'm not trying to be greedy with rankings, but I would love feedback and/or tips regarding any issues that could be contributing to this drop. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Recommended URL Structure
Hello, We are currently adding a new section of content on our site related to Marketing and more specifically 'Digital Marketing' (research reports, trend studies, etc). Over time (several months, or 1-3 years) we will add more 'general' marketing content. My question is which of the following URL structures makes more sense from an SEO perspective (and how best to quantify the benefit of one over another): www.mysite.com/marketing/digital/research/... www.mysite.com/digital-marketing/research/.. Thanks, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mike-gart0 -
Canonical URL Question
Hi Everyone I like to run this question by the community and get a second opinion on best practices for an issue that I ran into. I got two pages, Page A is the original page and Page B is the page with duplicate content. We already added** ="Page A**" />** to the duplicate content (Page B).** **Here is my question, since Page B is duplicate content and there is a link rel="canonical" added to it, would you put in the time to add meta tags and optimize the title of the page? Thanks in advance for all your help.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRTBA0 -
Questions regarding Google's "improved url handling parameters"
Google recently posted about improving url handling parameters http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html I have a couple questions: Is it better to canonicalize urls or use parameter handling? Will Google inform us if it finds a parameter issue? Or, should we have a prepare a list of parameters that should be addressed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0