URL formating is it worth changing?
-
One of my clients sites has almost OK URL's, set up something like the following:
keyword2_keyword3_keyword1
Ideally the URL's would be more like this:
keyword1-keyword2-keyword3
My question is is there any point in changing them and 301 redirecting them over just to get the target keywords in a better order and change the _ to a - ?
Has anyone tried this and its worked or not worked, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Justin
-
The first thing I would ask to myself is:
are these URLs over-optimized?
If the URLs looks like: www.domain.com/category/sub-category/keyword-keyword-keyword and keyword can be a three words query... then probably that url is over optimized and can be more a danger than a competitive factor.
Good practice tells us that is better to have the primary keyword in the url, better if matching, and not used like a digest of all the keywords we want to rank for in a page.
Apart that, you have to consider also these other two factors when it comes to urls:
- Usability: too long urls are very hard to remember, therefore you are loosing the opportunity to receive direct traffic from users typing the url directly in the browser (for instance, as many of us do typing directly: www.seomoz.org/q to enter the SEOmoz Q&A
- Too long urls tend to not be used as a way of creating natural linking citation, as when you cite - for instance - a post using its url and not creating a classic link with anchor text.
Therefore I would not use any of your alternatives, but this:
and 301 the old urls.
Finally, about on page optimization, I suggest you to read this old but still valid post by Rand Fishkin:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization
-
If the client isn't ranking well for the terms, then it's highly unlikely that making this minor change to the URL will really help out. If the client ranks well, then I would for sure not mess with the URL and risk the loss of any PR. Bottom line is that I would look for other areas to optimize and make the URL change as a last desperate attempt.
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
-
When I crawl my website I have urls with (#!162738372878) at the end of my urls
When I crawl my website I have urls with (#!162738372878) at the end of my urls. I used screaming frog to look check my website and I seen these. My normal urls are in there too, but each of them have a copy with this strange symbol and number at the end. I used a website builder called homestead to make the website and I seen a bunch of there urls in my crawl as well - http://editor.homestead.com/faq is an example I recently created a new website with their new website builder and transferred it to my old domain. However, I didnt know they didnt offer 301 redirects or canonical tags(learned about those afterwards) and I changed my page names. So they recommended I leave the old website published along with the new website. So if I search my website name on google, sometimes both will show in the results. I just want to sort this all out somehow. My website is www.coastlinetvinstalls.com Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Matt160 -
Best SEO url woocommerce, what to do?
Hi! Today we have our product categories indexed (by misstake) and for one of our desired keywords, a category have the nr 1 rank. By misstake, we didnt set nofollow, noindex on our categories, just tags, archives etc. We are now migrating to from Ithemes Exchange to Woocommerce and ime looking on improving our SEO urls for the categories. For keyword "Key1" we rank with this url: http://site/product-category/Key1. The seo meta title and description where untouched when we launched the site last spring so it doesnt look so good.. The plan is to stripe out product-category and instead ad some description ( i have a newly written text of 95 words, 519 letters without space with they keyword precent 5 times in a natural way ) to that particular category and have the url as following: http://site/key1 and then have a 301 redirect for the old http://site/product-category/Key1. What do you think of this? What shall i consider? on the right track? Grateful for any help! // Jonas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knubbz0 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Is it worth creating an Image Sitemap?
We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?1 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0 -
Our URLs have changed. Do we request our external links be updated as well?
Hello Forum, We've re-launched our website with a new, SEO-friendly URL structure. We have also set up 301 redirects from our old URLs to the new ones. Now, is there any benefit to asking those external websites that link to us to update their links with our new URLs? What is the SEO best practice? Thanks for your insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0