Link Structure June 2019
-
Question Which link structure is better in 2019 for best SEO practice
Example A) https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/soft-plastic-lures/
Or B) https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing/fishing-lures/soft-plastic-lures/
We're on the bigcommerce platform and used to have
https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/categories/soft-plastic-lures/
Last year we went from bigcommerce long URL to short to bypass the link juice being sent to /categories
Now we have an SEO company trying to sell me their services after a bit of a steady decline since september 2018 and told me that we should have link structure as example B and that is likely the reason for the dip.. Due to breadcrumbing, True or False?
I explained i had bread crumb like shown in https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/berkley-powerbait-t-tail-minnow/ buy the SEO guy said no it needs to be in the URL structure too.I was under the impression that Short urls opposed to long was better these days and link juice is passed better if it is short url direct to the point? Am i wrong?
-
We agree with Gaston. Our experience is that it almost is never worth the time to change URL structures on an established site. Instead, focus time and effort on creating more and better content, adding more internal links, and doing legit link building.
For example, we looked at this blog post, https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/blog/chasebaits-lure-range/, where you highlight four separate lures but you only link to one of the product pages instead of all four. Furthermore, you linked only once using a "Shop Now" button. We'd recommend adding another link to that product page linking the text of the name of the product somewhere above the "Shop Now" button within the content talking about that specific lure.
-
Hi Ben,
Short answer: URL structure has too small of an impact on Google rankings.
Long answer:
I work in XXXL e-commerce and had similar discussions and eventually tested different approaches. We saw no gain in rankings nor in impressions.
Also, hired some of the world best agencies and consultants to help us out. They came to the same conclusion. We cannot argue the data of our experiments.- Tested in different categories and in different countries.
There is also, the discussion that having a shorter URL helps in rankings has been addressed by John Mueller in some Google Webmaster Hangouts (currently can't find it), he said that it makes little to no difference. Instead of focusing on changing your internal systems and structures, use that energy and resources to improve user experience and content on the site.
There is a great possibility that your decline in Google traffic is due to other deeper issues. I'd suggest you and your team focus more on competitive analysis and trends on user behavior that trying to change the whole website URL structure.
A neat tip that I've sometimes been given is, check your internal linking. You might probably be linking too much or too little to your best pages.As you may imagine, this is not a simple issue. There is no clear actionable and probably just one change won't revert that steady decline.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston
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
-
Back links with instant effect?!
I realise this is incredibly controversial! And I also realise I’ll get a ton of trolls pulling me to shreds but… I’m in need of running a short-term experiment, but to do the experiment I need to get a test site ranking high very quickly (not worried about if it gets penalised, it is only a short-term test).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Links to external site (hotels link)
Hello, I am currently designing the webpages of my website and I am wondering if I should link externally or if it going to hurt me ? I am in the travel industry and for example in the France in the Loire valley, I want to list hotels that people can stay at in pre and pods trip. Is it ok to link to maybe 10 of those hotels websites or can it hurt me ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Internal links question
I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links. We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Cooking Recipes Blog Links
Hi, I am running an ecommerce store - cookware, bakeware, knives etc... I have someone I know personally that is a writer and one of her blogs is about cooking - lots of well established articles with keywords througout. Is there any harm in getting some inbound links from her blog on certain keywords? If so, should I limit the number of outgoing links per article she has? Any guidelines? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Not sure if I should disavow these links or not
I am on the marketing team for CandyGalaxy.com we are an online candy store that specializes in bulk candy for events. Were just about a year and a half old and i'm running into some SEO strategy road blocks lately. When we started the company we used an oversee's seo company. For the first few months results were great then things took a massive dive as google began rolling out updates early and mid last year. After that point we started taking things in house and have been trying to create content and begin content marketing. We launched a blog @ blog.candygalaxy.com and also launched and educational resource at candybuffet101.com - However the question i'm up against now is what to do with those bad old links? Are they actually hurting us? Or just neutral? I'm also trying to decided what to do about the links in my footer? We put those there because those are truly our most popular products and we wanted customers to have easy access, but are those links potentially harmful? I'm questioning these issues because I feel like there is something holding back some of my pages from ranking. For example "blue candy" is a very popular section of our website. We have worked on a lot of content for the blog related to blue candy, made videos, photo shoots ect. We have customer reviews on page and unique category content. According to open site explorer our DA and PA are around the range of most of the sites in the 8-12 serp position. But we have more social activity then all but the top 2-3 spots. However the page almost impossible to find via search. Its not in the first 300 results and surely the page is more relevant then an entry about quilts.. Similar situations like this have led me to think that maybe there is a technical underlying issues that I have not addressed. ? The content is definitely there because if i type in a line from the content directly to google it is the first result. So the site seems indexed properly.. Would love to hear any feedback from similar experiences or ideas. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan_Murrell0 -
Links on My website
I am looking to create some more trust on my website by subscribing to BBB. I have heard that my site is penalized and loses "link juice" if I place the BBB logo link in my page footer on every page of my website. Does anyone know how much I am penalized? Should I only put it on my conversion pages and maybe my main 10 sub pages? My main goal is to assist in getting conversions but I don't want to do it at the expense of getting a penalty. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Is this splitting my authority or link juice?
Hi Using seomoz i am getting told that a 302 temporary redirect is occurring on some of my pages for instance. http://www.eco-environments.co.uk/solar-power/ Then redirects here http://www.eco-environments.co.uk/solar-power/default.phuse is this splitting my page authority because of the temporary redirect? I just want to make sure i have fully understood what's happening before i go to the company who designed and developed our site as i am convinced this is hurting my rankings. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nickhoyle10 -
Quantifying Linking Campaign Value
Is there any way to predict if and how Organic traffic would change if we sucesfully added some high-quality links to our website? Quantifying link value would help to plan how much time/efforts we should spend on quality link-building. I understand that the more good links we get - the better. But beyond that, I am looking for some methodology/data/formulas that would help to decide if links are worth pursing. Here is an example: Let's say we acquired 20 high-quality links from PR 0-5 pages of some trusted web sites of PR6-8. Let's say that on these pages would also link to 10-20 other web sites. Would such campaign be of some direct value to our ecommerce website of PR6? My question is limited to how high-quality links improve overall Google search traffic to the website only. I am not interested in calculating value of individual keywords - most of our search traffic comes from long tail. I am also not interested in how to estimate referral traffic - both seem much easier topics to tackle. But how would I be able to measure the value of lets say 1 link from PR 8 site with a PR3 page, when there are 10 other external links on that page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Quidsi0