URL Structure "-" vs "/"? Are there any advantages to one over the other?
-
An example would be domain.com/keyword/keyword2 vs domain.com/keyword-keyword2
Are there any advantages / disadvantages to one over the other?
-
Lots of great feedback has been offered. In short, it's up to your personal preference.
I can't help but add a link because I have watched too many Matt Cutts videos (they are starting to auto-play in my head) and he answered your exact question.
-
the /keyword/ tells the search engine that you have a folder, the other does not. If your Keyword1 has a lot of sub/related keywords then creating a folder would be helpful. Google does search the index files of your folders... without being prompted to.
If you don't have a legit sub category then I would stick with the -.
-
The beginners guide to seo is a great place to start in terms of how to structure your URLs. I personally avoid the "domain.com/keyword/keyword2" type of URL structure. I'd stick with the latter format, but would make sure to not keyword stuff. Just keep it simple with one or two keywords as you mentioned. It's really ugly when you see a url that looks like http://www.domain.com/keyword-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4-keyword5-keyword6-keyword7. I know I hate it when I see those URLs show up in the SERPS. I believe Rand touched on this in The Future of LInk Building webinar from a while back.
-
Well your first example would be referencing 2 separate directories, where the second example is one directory.
Here's a quick snippet of an article from Rand. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls
These last examples have done nearly everything right:
- http://www.discoverohio.com/visitors/map.asp
Brilliant - it's short, descriptive, static and obvious. - http://web.mit.edu/is/usability/usability-guidelines.html
Despite the subdomain, everything else is near perfect. - http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/jk35.html
I'm letting the White House off the hook for not using "john-kennedy" as the page title, because they've wisely also provided his number (the US' 35th President).
- http://www.discoverohio.com/visitors/map.asp
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
-
"Equity sculpting" with internal nofollow links
I’ve been trying a couple of new site auditor services this week and they have both flagged the fact that I have some nofollow links to internal pages. I see this subject has popped up from time to time in this community. I also found a 2013 Matt Cutts video on the subject: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links At a couple of SEO conferences I’ve attended this year, I was advised that nofollow on internal links can be useful so as not to squander link juice on secondary (but necessary) pages. I suspect many websites have a lot of internal links in their footers and are sharing the love with pages which don’t really need to be boosted. These pages can still be indexed but not given a helping hand to rank by strong pages. This “equity sculpting” (I made that up) seems to make sense to me, but am I missing something? Examples of these secondary pages include login pages, site maps (human readable), policies – arguably even the general contact page. Thoughts? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Warren_Vick
Warren1 -
WMT "Index Status" vs Google search site:mydomain.com
Hi - I'm working for a client with a manual penalty. In their WMT account they have 2 pages indexed.If I search for "site:myclientsdomain.com" I get 175 results which is about right. I'm not sure what to make of the 2 indexed pages - any thoughts would be very appreciated. google-1.png google-2.png
Technical SEO | | JohnBolyard0 -
Parked former company's url on top of my existing url and that URL is showing in SERPs for my top keywords
I have the URL from my former company parked on top of my existing URL. My top keywords are showing up with the old URL attached to the metadsecription of my existing URL. It was supposed to be 301 redirected instead of parked but my web developer insists this was the right way to do it and it will work itself out after google indexes the old URL out of existence. Are there any other options?
Technical SEO | | Joelabarre0 -
Implementation of rel="next" & rel="prev"
Hi All, I'm looking to implement rel="next" & rel="prev", so I've been looking for examples. I looked at the source code for the MOZ.com forum, if anyone one is going to do it properly MOZ are. I noticed that the rel="next" & rel="prev" tags have been implemented in the a href tags that link to the previous and next pages rather than in the head. I'm assuming this is fine with Google but in their documentation they state to put the tags in the . Does it matter? Neil.
Technical SEO | | NDAY0 -
Looking for feedback about "look-ahead" navigation
Our company has been creating websites where the navigation is developed in such a way as to allow the visitor to get a preview of the image and/or content on that is on the page. Here are two websites that use this technology:
Technical SEO | | TopFloor
http://www.uniquepadprinting.com/
http://www.empathia.com/ (On this site, the previews are only available if you click on "Whole", "Productive" or "Safe" at the top of the page. I'm looking for feedback such as: What do you call this type of navigation (We call it look-ahead, but I can't find much info that term on the web) Have you experienced any issues with this type of navigation? Do you have any recommendations on it? Some of the things we've seen are: It adds the same content to every page of the website It creates a lot of internal links It can create a lot of code on pages It can slow page-load times0 -
What is "evttag=" used for?
I see evttag= used on realtor.com, what looks to be for click tracking purposes. Does anyone know if this is an official standard or something they made up?
Technical SEO | | JDatSB0 -
Rel="canonical" for PFDs?
Hello there, We have a lot of PDFs that seem to end up on other websites. I was wondering if there was a way to make sure that our website gets the credit/authority as the original creator. Besides linking directly from the PDF copy to our pages, is anyone aware of strategy for letting Google know that we are the original publishers? I know search engines can index HTML versions of PDFs, so is there anyway to get them to index a rel="canonical" tag as well? Thoughts/Ideas?
Technical SEO | | Tektronix0 -
When URL rewrite can lead to un pretty URLs
Hi Mozzers. I've a client that has done a little bit of mess rewriting the URLs of its site. In fact, also the data base driven URLs are rewritten, but the dev forgot to change the space with "-", so that now the 95% of the URLs are like this one: http://www.portalesardegna.com/search/Appartamenti e Residence/ Obviously not really a pretty URL. I am not so sure if this issue has an SEO consecuences (in fact, the site ranks pretty well also with those kind of url), but I am thinking more on usability issue. Could you suggest me any easy fix to this rewrite problem?
Technical SEO | | gfiorelli12