Need URL structure suggestions
-
On my website I am in the process of creating expat city guides for different cities in Cambodia. I've already gotten three up, but I am worried that my URL structure is not the best, so I am wondering if I should fix it before I put the rest up.
Right now the city guides are housed here: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/
There's a section for each city, this one is for Battambang: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang
And then there are sections for hotels, restaurants, etc. movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang/battambang-hotels-and-accommodation
So once you finally get to a review for an individual hotel or activity, the URL is really long, like this: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-and-island-guides/battambang/battambang-hotels-and-accommodation/classy-hotel
Should I just par the section names down so the URL would be something like this: movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ ?
I was hoping by having the long URLs slugs for my section pages, such as "battambang-hotels-and-accommodation" they would be more likely to show on search terms like "Battambang hotels" than if the section was just "accommodation." However, this whole section is getting much less search traffic than anything else on my site, so I am wondering if it is because of these ridiculously long URLs. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
-
Can it be that the traffic from Google are expats? Since it's hard to give people a face solely based on Google Analytics data. Either way you look at it, I think the best solution is the one that services your visitors and is SEO friendly. And if you’re facing the situation you can’t choose between the two, I would always stick with designing for people instead of search engines.
Since search engines are getting pretty smart in detecting unnatural “optimalisation” and a good user experience results indirect in good rankings (dwell time for example) as well.
-
Thank you. The problem is that my target audience (expats in Cambodia or coming to Cambodia) is not my actual audience. For this sort of thing, I get most of my traffic from people coming from Google searches. The site has been up for several years now (although the guides are relatively new) and this pattern has remained steady. I am not sure if I should be designing for the audience I want or the audience I have.
-
Hi Lina,
It would keep the URL's short and descriptive for your visitors and more important in the SERP's which could increase your CTR.
Besides that, my experience is that people look for either an hotel or information about the place. Although they will find the information useful at some point the starting of a search (entering the query in Google) will focus on either information about the place or information about the hotels.
This way I would split the information on your website as well and make sure you point your visitors to it with internal links or buttons.
That’s just my point of view, asking your target audience about this is a great way to make decisions as well!
-
I could, but it would ruin my sidebars. Also, my idea is that people will be looking at all of the stuff for one particular city, so it makes sense to keep each city in its own subfolder.
What do you think the advantage is to having the hotels in their own subfolder? I was thinking about re-doing the sidebars manually anyway (right now they are automatic based on the Wordpress structure)
-
-
Hi Lina,
Can't you just make a page for city guides and one for hotels and use those as head pages and put the rest under those?
So
head page: hotels
under that: battambang and under that one the classy hotels page
And for the guide something like:
head page: expat city's
under that: battanbang guide
Just an idea, good luck with redirecting!
-
-
Thank you! I use the term hotels much more, but I used 'accommodation and hotels' because some of the places are guesthouses, not hotels, etc.
I'm using Wordpress so there's no easy way for me to get the /expat-city-and-island-guides/ out of the URL, but I can shorten it to /expat-city-guides/ or even /city-guides/. I might keep expat because it's an important keyword for me. For the same reason (Wordpress structure) I can't move battambang after accommodations without changing the whole site structure (and design) which I don't think I am willing to do.
I think I'll try movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/hotels/classy-hotel
Seems more manageable and readable. Now I just need to set up 301s on all of the old pages....eep.
-
Hi Lina500,
I think you’re right about changing this before moving on. In any website we develop website structure comes before content creation.
I understand your concern about keywords in the URL and the length of the URL. The current URL is pretty confusing for your visitors and is probably too long to read.
Gladly for you, Google doesn’t put too much weight on keywords in your URL and they are getting better and better at understanding what pages are about. A Word like accommodations will be known as a close variant of hotels for example. This way a descriptive URL is just fine.
In your situation I would find out what words are used most. For example:
Accommodations vs hotels
Island guides vs city guides
If the most searched keyword describes the page I would pick that one. If however the other keyword fits the content of that page best I would pick the other keyword.
Your own suggestion movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ seems like a pretty good one to me.
I would only skip /expat-city-guides/ and make it movetocambodia.com/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ since these are keywords that get used combined. People won’t search for city guide classy hotel for example.
In the ideal situation I would go for /expat city guides/battambang/ for the city guides and put your accommodation overview under /accommodations/battambang/classy-hotel/ (without /expat-city-guides/ before it.).
I hope this helps!
-
I'd suggest you to incorporate "Breadcrumbs" approach in managing your links for search engines as you can easily map your link structure. It will be something like this:
expat-city-and-island-guides >> battambang >> battambang-hotels-and-accommodation >>classy-hotel
As far as the current links are concerned, I don't think you need to insert city names in URL multiple times. Come up with descriptive but short URL for each page as you've already implemented the "Breadcrumbs", search engines will understand how your site is structured.
For more info about Breadcrumbs, check out this post from Ann Smarty:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/breadcrumbs/15022/ -
Thanks! Just had a look at these links, very helpful. In my above examples, do you think having the city name in the URL more than once makes it look spammy? I am not sure if I should change these since the pages are already up for a few months or if I should just be more brief in the new guides.
-
Hey Lina,
I'd suggest you to take a look at these posts from Rand for better understanding,
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urlsHonestly speaking, the long URLs doesn't bother search engines, they can process them without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and UX.
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
-
Need Advice on Categorizing Posts, Using Topics, Site Navigation & Structure
Hey there, My site had terrible categorization. I did a redesign, and essentially decided to start over using Topics instead of categories - which appear as my site's main navigation. Now I need to assign a Topic to all my posts. Is it safe to assign posts to multiple parent Topics from an SEO point of view? I want to do it since it would be helpful for users to find them in multiple locations some of the time, but I certainly don't want any SEO issues. Also, should I de-categorize all of my posts since I'm assigning them to my new hierarchical taxonomy - Topics? This is very important to finalize. Any help or advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Mike
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Need help with list schema!
Hi all, I am trying out list schema on my site, but in Google's structured data testing tool I'm having an issue with the URL section. Whenever I have the same URL for each position is says that duplicate URLs aren't allowed, then when I have different URLs it says that they all have to be the same URL. Does anyone have any pointers that can help make my list schema error free!? Heres my schema:
Technical SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.0 -
Same URL names in one domain
Hi All, I have 9 different subdirectories for languages in the same domain example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages. I know it is better to translate URLs, but we won't for now, because all the NON-ASCII characters. But we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at least for the main domain URLs? www.example.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
How Shold I Structure URLs for a Portfolio?
Hi Moz Community, My web design agency has a lot of different projects we showcase in the portfolio of our site, but I'm having trouble finding information on the best practices for how to structure the URLs for all of those portfolio pages. We have tons of projects that we've done in the same service category and even multiple projects we've done for the same company within that category. For example, right now things look like: www.rootdomain.com/portfolio/web-design/clientname which tends to get long, bulky and awkward, considering we do lots of projects in the web design category and might do a second project for the same company. How should we differentiate the projects from a URL standpoint to avoid having all of the pages compete for the same keyword? Does it even matter, given that these portfolio showcases are primarily image-based anyways?
Technical SEO | | formandfunctionagency0 -
URL spacing help
Hi all, easy question: I have a client URL...example.com/giftbags that has been indexed for a while. Should I change the URL to example.com/gift-bags to separate these words for better KW ranking, or would the change be useless at this point? Thanks, -Reed
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
/out/ URLs in GWMTs
I am recently seeing some URLs come up as 404s in GWMTs for a client. They look like this: http://client-url/out/www.linkedin.com/company/client-linkedin-name /out/client-url/sub-directory/postname/ We thought they might have something to do with the social plugins but they are all over the place and they are sometime for internal pages on the site. Anyone run into these and know why they are happening?
Technical SEO | | DragonSearch0 -
How to change URL of RSS Feed?
Hi, There are some websites that keeps on scraping my content. I have blocked them already from accessing my website using .htaccess but they still get my content via RSS feed. I have tried delaying the RSS feed but I think this affected google rankings. My question is, is there a way to change the URL of my RSS Feed? From: http://www.mysite.com/feed to http://www.mysite.com/feed2
Technical SEO | | Trigun0 -
URL Rewrite
Using the .htaccess file how do I rewrite a url from www.exampleurl.com/index.php?page=example to www.exampleurl.com/example removing index.php?page= Any help is muchly appreciated
Technical SEO | | CraigAddyman0