URL's for news content
-
We have made modifications to the URL structure for a particular client who publishes news articles in various niche industries. In line with SEO best practice we removed the article ID from the URL - an example is below:
http://www.website.com/news/123/news-article-title
http://www.website.com/news/read/news-article-titleSince this has been done we have noticed a decline in traffic volumes (we have not as yet assessed the impact on number of pages indexed). Google have suggested that we need to include unique numerical IDs in the URL somewhere to aid spidering. Firstly, is this policy for news submissions? Secondly (if the previous answer is yes), is this to overcome the obvious issue with the velocity and trend based nature of news submissions resulting in false duplicate URL/ title tag violations? Thirdly, do you have any advice on the way to go?
Thanks
P.S. One final one (you can count this as two question credits if required), is it possible to check the volume of pages indexed at various points in the past i.e. if you think that the number of pages being indexed may have declined, is there any way of confirming this after the event?
Thanks again!
Neil
-
Hi Neil,
Your URL structure is affecting Google News. There is information here about the URL structure requirements, which can be waived if you use a Google News sitemap. http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=151309.
I don't know of any way to see the number of pages indexed historically, unfortunately.
-
SO, for this one, make a small research on any news website, and on the seomoz blog articles, you will see every url is unique, and for this question, i prefer you urgently to read the seomoz ebook for starters, and read the next book from Randfishkin,and another seos, the name of book is: http://www.amazon.com/Art-SEO-Mastering-Optimization-Practice/dp/0596518862
and google website optimizing, you must understand the search engine friendly,really good, how to make urls,why, what kind of url, avoid the duplicate content, page=moves, because you are moving the published articles, to the new url, and this make a duplicate content on the google-crawl.
But the best answer is, read the art-of-seo ebook,and you will learn all and do perfectly.
hope it helps,
thanks
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
-
URLs with dashes between words or nothing at all? ( ../some-content vs. ../somecontent)
Here's a quick and easy question: Is there any problem with not using dashes in between words for URLs? Obviously the readability factor is a concern, but from a search engine standpoint? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | tbinga0 -
Should I use my competitor's name in my content to help my rankings?
If I have a competitor that ranks higher than me, would it be helpful to use their name in my content, or in my meta information?
Technical SEO | | greaterstudio0 -
What's the correct SEO for a Gallery?
Hi there, I was wondering if anyone was an expert on galleries and using canonical URL's? URL: http://www.tecsew.com/gallery In short I'm doing SEO for a site and it has a large gallery (3000+ images) where each specific image has it's own page and each category (there's 200+) also has its own page. Now, what I'm thinking is that this should be reduced and asking Google to index/rank each page is wrong (I also think this because the quality of the pages are relatively low i.e little text & content etc) Therefore, what should be suggested/done to the gallery? Should just the main gallery categories get indexed (i.e http://www.tecsew.com/3d-cad-showcase)? Or should I continue to allow Google to trawl through all of it? Or should canonical URL's be used? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Best Wishes, Charlie S
Technical SEO | | media.street0 -
Buying multiple domains: misspells & .net, org, etc. & 301's
Hi, an SEO guy told me to buy up domains like ours X.org, net, biz, etc. & mispellings. this could cost over $100/year. Is is worth it for SEO or is it just covering our @ss if competitors want to get stupid and buy those? I don't forsee competitors doing that. What do you suggest? Does Google actually give us points for those AND if we bought them are we supposed to redirect all of them to our site? Should I be doing this for our SEO clients? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | JCunningham0 -
Would duplicate listings effect a client's ranking if they used same address?
Lots of duplication on directory listings using similar or same address, just different company names... like so-and-so carpet cleaning; and another listing with so-and-so janitorial services. Now my client went from a rank around 3 - 4 to not even in the top 50 within a week. -- -- -- Would duplication cause this sudden drop? Not a lot of competition for a client using keyword (janitorial services nh); -- -- -- would a competitor that recently optimized a site cause this sudden drop? Client does need to optimize for this keyword, and they do need to clean up this duplication. (Unfortunately this drop happened first of March -- I provided the audit, recommendations/implementation and still awaiting the thumbs up to continue with implementation). --- --- --- Did Google make a change and possibly find these discrepancies within listings and suddenly drop this client's ranking? And they there's Google Places:
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar
Client usually ranks #1 for Google Places with up to 12 excellent reviews, so they are still getting a good spot on the first page. The very odd thing though is that Google is still saying that need to re-verify their Google places. I really would like to know for my how this knowledge how a Google Places account could still need verification and yet still rank so well within Google places on page results? because of great reviews? --- Any ideas here, too? _Cindy0 -
How do I 301 url's with numbers in them?
I have a number of 404 error pages showing in webmaster tools and some of the url's have numbers, % symbols, and some are pdf's. My usual 301 redirect in my htaccess file does NOT redirect these pages where the url's have special characters. What am I doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0 -
Different TLD's same content - duplicate content? - And a problem in foreign googles?
Hi, Operating from the Netherlands with customers troughout Europe we have for some countries the same content. In the netherlands and Belgium Dutch is spoken and in Germany and Switserland German is spoken. For these countries the same content is provided. Does Google see this as duplicate content? Could it be possible that a german customer gets the Swiss website as a search result when googling in the German Google? Thank you for your assistance! kind regards, Dennis Overbeek [email protected]
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Google shows the wrong domain for client's homepage
Whenever the homepage of my client's homepage appears in Google results, the search engine is not showing our URL as our domain, but instead a partner domain that is linking to us. (The correct title and meta description of our homepage is showing.) I believe this is caused by the partner website (with a much higher pank rank) linking to our homepage from their footer to a URL with it's own domain that 302 redirects to our homepage. Example: Link: http://www.partnerwebsite.com/?ad2203 302 redirects to: http://www.clientwebsite.com/?moreadtracking The simple fix would be for the client to ask for removal of the 302 hijacking link - but they are uncomfortable with this request since they had requested it prior, and their relationship is not the best. Is there any other way to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Conor_OShea_ETUS0