Spaces in URL line
-
Hi Gurus,
I recently made the mistake of putting a space into a URL line between two words that make up my primary key word. Think
www.example.com/Jelly Donuts/mmmNice.php
instead of
www.example.com/JellyDonuts/mmmNice.php
This mistake now needed fixing to www.example.com/Jelly Donuts/mmmNice.php to pass W3, but has been in place for a while but most articles/documents under 'Jelly Donuts' are not ranking well (which is probably the obvious outcome of the mistake).
I am wondering whether the best solution from an SEO ranking viewpoint is to:
1. Change the article directory immediately to www.example.com/JellyDonuts/mmmNice.php and rel=canonical each article to the new correct URL. Take out the 'trash' using robots.txt
or to
301 www.example.com/Jelly Donut to the www.example.com/JellyDonut directory?
or perhaps something else?
Thanks in advance for your help with this sticky (but tasty) conundrum,
Brad
-
I would use a dash "-" Jelly-Donut and 301 to that page. Essentially only use a canonical when there is a direct reason for the similar content to be there like a dynamic database search and a "similar; SEO version. Or Pagination.
Give the Jelly%20Donuts/mmmNice.php will no longer be needed and an exact duplicate of its new location a 301 is best here.
-Phil
-
I agree with Webdeal, go with the 301
-
Hi BM7,
I would go with 301
Some more information for you - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Cheers
Dmitriy
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
-
Changing URLs from sentence case to lower case
Hi Guys, We are contemplating of changing our site URL structure from sentence case to all lowercase. www.example.com/All-Products/Bedroom-Furniture/ www.example.com/all-products/bedroom-furniture/ We will use 301 redirect for old to new. Its a 3 year old ecommerce site and currently rank very decent on serps. The agency that does our seo is recommending this change and reckons that all lowecase URLs as preferred over our current URL structure. My worry is we will lose our current ranking but agency advises that rankings will probably go lower or fluctuate for some time and get back to its original position or may even rank better in due course as we are doing a 301 redirect and once the site is crawled Google will know the change. We are approaching Christmas and thenext 2 months are most busiest period of the year, we don't want to risk on traffic. I would really appreciate if the community experts can advise, Is it really that lowercase URLs are better than our current url structure? By doing 301 will our rankings come back to same in "due course" ? How much of a risk is it to do these changes at this time of the year? Thanking you in advance, Sohail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tigersohelll1 -
Redirect to url with parameter
I have a wiki (wiki 1) where many of the pages are well index in google. Because of a product change I had to create a new wiki (wiki 2) for the new version of my product. Now that most of my customers are using the new version of my product I like to redirect the user from wiki 1 to wiki 2. An example of a redirect could be from wiki1.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen to wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen. Because of a technical issue the url I redirect to, needs to have a parameter like "?" so the example will be wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen? Will the search engines see it as I have two pages with same content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Debitoor
wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen
and
wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen? And will the SEO juice from wiki1.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen be transfered to wiki2.website.com/how_to_build_kitchen?0 -
How much is the effect of redirecting an old URL to another URL under a new domain?
Example: http://www.olddomain.com/buy/product-type/region/city/area http://www.newdomain.com/product-type-for-sale/city/area Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow20130 -
Does having shorter URLs help with rankings?
Hello here.I own an e-commerce website (virtualsheetmusic.com), and some of our most important category pages have pretty long URLs. Here is an example: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Violin.html I am evaluating the possibility to shorten URLs like the above to something like: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/violin/ But since it is going to pretty hard and time consuming (considering the custom system we have in place on that site), I am trying to find out if it really matters and worth doing it from a SEO stand point. I am aware that from a user prospective shorter URLs are preferable, and we plan to pursue a better URL architecture on our website in the near future just for that, but this question, at the moment, should be strictly related to SEO. Any thoughts on this topic are very welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Correct URL Parameters for GWT?
Hi, I am just double checking to see if these parameters are ok - I have added an attachment to this post. We are using an e-commerce store and dealing with faceted navigation so I excluded a lot of parameters from being crawled as I didnt want them indexed. (they got indexed anyway!). Advice and recommendations on the use of GWT would be very helpful - please check my screenshot. thanks, B0gSmRu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
What Is The Preferred Url Structure For Se’s?
Here is my issue, my domain is abcdomian.com and I’m trying to rank the site for the keyword “example”. All of my content is under “abcdomain.com/folder/example/” and building content off of “abcdomain.com/example” is not an option. So I’m thinking about moving the content to “abcdomain.com/online-example/” and 301ing the old pages . Of the two paths below, which will have a greater impact on my rankings for the term “example”? Current: abcdomain.com/folder/example/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | samp582
Proposed: abcdomain.com/online-example/ Thoughts?0 -
Does URL format affect Keyword effectiveness for a URL?
I am looking at our site structure, and don't want to have to rebuild the way the site was linked together based on it's current folder structure so I am wondering what option would work better for our URL structure. I will uses car categories as an example of what I am talking about, but you can insert any category structure you like. For example I would like to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford-convertibles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SL_SEM
www.example.com/chevy-convertibles But instead due to the site structure I will need to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford/convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/convertibles But wonder if I shouldn't do the following to ensure the proper phrase is known for the page: www.example.com/ford/ford-convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/chevy-convertibles The "/ford/ford-convertibles" just seems odd to me as a human, but I haven't seen anything on how well a keyphrase in a URL split by /'s does and I know dashes for phrases are fine. This means I am inclined to go with the"/ford/ford-convertibles"style because it keeps the keyphrase separated by dashes even if it is a bit repetitive. There will be other pages too like "/ford/top-10-fords-ever" but I don't wonder about that since it isnt "ford/ford-xxxxx" Thoughts on whether /'s in a keyphrase are as good as dashes?0 -
Rel=Canonical URLs?
If I had two pages: PageA about Cats PageB about Dogs If PageA had a link rel=canonical to PageB, but the content is different, how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?" If PageA 301 redirected to PageB, (no content in PageA since it's 301 redirected), how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | visionnexus0