Do a lot of related articles in lower subfolders, boost higher level subfolder keywords?
-
For instance www.example1.com/cooltopic/ has 5 ‘verycool articles’ under /cooltopic/
www.example1.com/cooltopic/verycool-article1/ , www.example1.com/cooltopic/verycool-article2/.
On www.example2.com/cooltopic/ there are 100 ‘verycool articles’
Who will rank above the other for the term ‘cooltopic’ in the SERPS? Is it www.example1.com with 5 ‘verycool articles’ or www.example2.com with 100 ‘verycool articles’. Or does the quantity of (theme related) articles in subfolders not matter?
And what if example1.com has more quality external links from the ‘awesome community’. Would this change a lot in the rankings?
Or what if both domains have 0 external links, but example2.com has 95 more internal links (from the articles) to /cooltopic/ than example1.com with only 5 articles.
-
Thanks again for your input,
The reason this question arrose was because i was thinking of a news structure from a users perspective and my collgeague from a technical standpoint. Also he showed me how a friend of his got to the first page in the serps simply by moving a lot of related content under a subfolder.
This i found hard to believe, that simply putting in content under a subfolder would make the higher subfolder automatically rank higher.
Up to 5 years ago i thought sites rank well because they write a lot of articles, then i in 2007 i started reading up and focussing on SEO and understood that its not about quantity but quality and hierarchy and that really got me interested in SEO.
So i thought a 'traditional' news category like www.example.com/news/ with related articles (inter)linking to related subfolder landing pages would be a logical experience for the user and thus for bots. But 'sparring' with my colleague who is imo a very good programmer, made me second guess myself and the situation, and thus i ended up asking the great seomoz community :).
So thanks again for the input and will probably have the articles both under www.example.com/news/topic-article1/ and under www.example.com/topic/news/opic-article1/ (with a canonical tag on it).
Also i have never thought about the concequences for CTR in the SERPS using the dates in the url's. Thats a very valid point and wil have to take a look at how 'evergreen' the written news articles are. Comming to think of it I also unconsciously ávoid' sites with urls showing old dates when searching for something specific. I even goes as fas as changing the date range in search settings.
I've added a video for you enjoyment. It's the one and only SEO Rapper from way back when... enjoy
-
I htink that /related-topic/news can work, but it does depend on the topic and what people are looking for and expecting.
If they got to /related-topic/news will they miss out on stuff that they are likely to want to see under /other-topic/news ? Will people be looking for /news/ which this structure probably wouldn't support that well? Users first - bot second.
One other tip: If you are thinking of adding date in to the URL have a think about how evergreen your content is likely to be. If it is all really topical then date in url can work well: People search, can see it is recent and your CTR will go up.
However if you are using the same content area for longer term content then it can have the opposite effect. Someone searches a year later, seest the old date and assumes that it is our dated even if it isn't.
-
Hi Mat Bennett,
First of thanks a lot for thinking about my predicament and giving a well-structured reply.
The reason why i asked the question had to do with the placing of news articles on our website.
Initially i would say news articles should go under www.example.com/news/article-title/ or similar www.example.com/news/2012/october/article-title/
But my colleague has placed news under a theme related section like this www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/ with the idea that this would boost www.example.com/related-topic/ for the keyword ‘related-topic’.
His thinking is that google looks at the url like this -> www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/ then checks out www.example.com/related-topic/news/ and then google crawls www.example.com/related-topic/.
So by placing a lot of theme related news articles in a subfolder google would crawl www.example.com/related-topic/ more often. His point being the url is optimized for google and menu structure and links onsite are optimized for the users experience. After reading your reply and some more discussion, we will probably end up doing the following -> Create a news system then place the news under www.example.com/news/article-title or www.example.com/news/2012/october/article-title. And also place the news articles under the related main categories like so www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/.
And to avoid duplicate content issues www.example.com/news/article-title would be canonically linked to www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/ (this being the ‘original’).
This way we should cater to both the user and search engine.
What do u think of such a setup?
P.S. movie tip. I watched ‘Indie Game - the movie’ last night and it was very inspirational.
-
I think I follow.
Looking at it in a vacuum I would say that example2 has a tiny advantage. The net link equity of what is pointing back to the category page is the same in both cases, but there is greater emphasis from the internal anchor text. In practical terms this will be very small though.
In a real situation there are so many larger issues at play that you'd struggle to measure this. the effects in incoming links, overall domain authority, on page optimisation etc etc etc are going to far out weigh this.
Reading between the lines...
I am guessing that you are really asking "should I structure my site like this, or like that?". If that is the question then do what makes for the most usable site. Do though factor in whether more category pages could be useful in their own right as landing pages as well.
Picking the most usable site means a site that people are more likely to enjoy using. That means that they stay longer, hopefully make you some money whilst they are there, mention it to friends, tweet it, share it, link to it etc. Those things can bring real,measurable benefits
I hope that is useful.
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
-
Why Isnt My New Article Indexed?
I posted this article last night: http://www.londontri.com/325/tomtom-runner-gps-watch-review It didn't appear in Google's index this morning despite me pointing a few high quality links to it (not keyword optimized links, just links from high quality forum posts) On closer examination I thought that the problem could be due to a keyword stuffing penalty so I have made sure that I am not repeating too many words/word combinations using a keyword density checker but the article is still not indexed. Any ideas what could be going on?
On-Page Optimization | | ross88guy0 -
The seomoz on page keyword analysis tool is not showing title or keyword in document
the SEOMOZ onpage analysis tool is not not showing title or keyword for any page in one of my sites. It says there are no title elements on my page and there are, i checked the source code myself and they are there and correct. my title and keywords are in there and show up fine in firefox and internet explorer even after i refresh them. why would this tool show them as missing in one of my sites but not others? I'm worried that google's spider might not see them if the on page analyzer doesn't see them and my rankings might drop. they showed up the other day in the seomoz on page analyzer just fine and i haven't changed anything. Thanks mozzers!
On-Page Optimization | | Ron100 -
How to handle lots of outbound links
I decided to create a page on my website where I would list all of my favorite resources and 3rd party tools. There are now 35 links in the main content section of the page, all with anchor text, pointing to websites in my industry. My question is this: what is the best practice here? Should I add nofollow tags to the links? Should I do something else to indicate that these links shouldn't be crawled? Frankly, I don't mind passing some link juice to these tools (in this case, and from this particular website), but I might make a different decision with a client's website. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Here is the page I'm referring to, in case anyone wants to look: http://willmarlow.com/resources-2/the-digital-marketing-toolbox/. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | williammarlow0 -
Changing Subfolder that has been crawled before
Question: I am using a wordpress multisite and I enabled the crawl options yesterday www.abc.com/subfolder <-original but i find that www.abc.com/sub is good enough I checked the site:abc.com but I find that my pages in the /subfolder has been crawled before. Can I just change it to www.abc.com/sub or it will raise duplicate content issue?
On-Page Optimization | | joony20080 -
Need help with fluctuating ranking for a specific keyword
my website www.totalmanagement.com fluctuates for the search term: web based property management software I have been using SEO Moz for a few months now and have managed to get to the top 5 and jump around between 3 and 5. Does anyone have any suggestions to assist me? Long term goal is also to really target: Property Management Software But I am still very new at this. Thanks in advance for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | dgruhin0 -
Relating forum discussions to improve internal linking
Hi all, I have a matter i would like a discussion about, since I am looking for a good solution. First the case: I have a site with a large community based discussion board. We daily have 40 to 80 active forum threads with average of 200 posts. As it is right now each thread page shows, at the bottom of the thread, the 20 threads with latest activity. From a SEO point of view this is not the best solution, since all thread pages passes link juice to the latest 20 threads. However, the threads change daily so the juice is sprayed around all over the place. What I want to do is related forum threads, such that each thread at the bottom shows up to 10 threads which could be of interest to the reader. In this way one thread will have more or less the same threads at the bottom at all time, unless the relevancy is better for other threads, causing som minor changes to happen over time. The question is, how can one do this? In the backend, the forum has two tables. One holding threads and one holding posts relating to the threads. All in all the system has 66.500 threads, and in total 469.000 posts. Every thread has a title, and the posts are of varying length. The threads have categories, but they are not so distinct that a thread in one category can not be related to a thread in another category. So I would like to make the relevancy from the title of the thread and the content of the forum posts. As of yet I have not come up with a good solution, and i will look forward to reading any feedback for this. I will answer any questions as fast as possible, to get a good discussion goint here. Best regards, Rasmus
On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang0 -
Title Tag, Are the Keywords Plucked out of it?
We are working on redoing our site and I read the article from rand about how to properly format title tags, here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tactical-seo-how-many-termsphrases-should-i-target-on-a-single-page He showed how he could take 6 keywords and use them all in the title tag: The title Tag:
On-Page Optimization | | donford
Ted Baker London - Men's Clothing Collections 2005-2008 | Sartorialmoz.org The keywords:
Ted Baker
Ted Baker London
Ted Baker Clothing
Ted Baker Mens
Ted Baker Mens Clothing
Ted Baker Mens Collection So what I am wondering is the keyword Ted Baker Mens Collection actually getting found. In this case we are dealing with a contraction (men's) and a plural form of a keyword (collections). Is it plucked out from the title tag above?
Like this? Ted Baker London - Men's Clothing Collections 2005-2008 | Sartorialmoz.org In his article he goes on to say the biggest mistake he sees is, unfortunately exactly the way our site was built 6 years ago. That is people doing this: Ted Baker, Ted Baker London, Ted Baker Clothing, Ted Baker Men's Clothing, Ted Baker Clothing Collection - Buy Online Now at Manamialameseo.com Our site does just that, while we are PR 4 and get decent traffic for the business we are in, we are doing a huge update with new pages, information, and most importantly trying to get all the SEO the best as possible. I want to make sure before we make these what could be huge impact changes that search engines do in fact Pluck the keywords from the title tag, and they are not required to be together. Thank you for any thoughts, answers and most importantly your time. Example following this formula: Our Top 3 Keywords:
Molded Rubber
Rubber Molding
Custom Molded Rubber Our Old way:
Title: Custom Molded Rubber, Rubber Molding, Molded Rubber
The new way:
Title: Custom Molded Rubber - Molding Services | OurSite.com0 -
Keyword use in Title tag?
To improve SEO on a particular keyword, should you use that same keyword in the title tag of multiple pages within your site? Will that help or would it actually hurt by causing pages within your site to complete against each other for that keyword? Does it make a difference if that keyword is truly used on all those different pages?
On-Page Optimization | | KHCreative0