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
-
Importance of external links in 2018
How important are external links in 2018. How much of a percentage do they represent when deciding to rank a page. I imagine it depends on the query but I was wondering it if 10 % of of 60 % ? My feeling is that with good content you can get on almost any query on the 1 st page without links because that would be too penalising to small business if they had no possibility to rank with just content. Looking forward to getting some feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics2 -
Internal links decrease dramatically
I have an unknown problem with my internal links. but after many searches on Moz community and other sites, I didn't find any answer. the question is: why homepage doesn't enough internal links like other pages? the homepage internal links decrease dramatically in 2 months but it doesn't happen to other pages in the same domain 6l6Bh D0bC1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | canadaoptimize0 -
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
Affiliate Links Dilemma
Hello everyone. Our e-commerce website virtualsheetmusic.com has several hundreds affiliate incoming links, and many of them are "follow" links. I thought to redirect all incoming affiliate links to a "intermediate" page excluded by the robots.txt file in order to avoid any possible "commercial links" penalty from Google, but I now face a dilemma... most of our best referral links are affiliate links, by excluding those links from our back link profile could give us a big hit in terms of rankings. How would you solve this dilemma? What would you suggest doing in this sort of cases?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Internal Linking - Can You Over Do It?
Hi, One of the sites I'm working on has a forum with thousands of pages, amongst thousands of other pages. These pages produce lots of organic search traffic... 200,000 per month. We're using a bit of custom code to link relevant words and phrases from various discussion threads to hopefully related discussion pages. This generates thousands of links and up to 8 in-context links per page. A page could have anywhere from 200 to 3000 words in one to 50+ comments. Generally, a page with 200 words would have fewer of these automatically generated links, just because there are fewer terms naturally on the page. Is there any possible problem with this, including but not limited to some kind of internal anchor text spam or anything else? We do it to knit together pages for link juice and hopefully user experience... giving them another page to go to. The pages we link to are all our pages that produce or we hope to produce organic search traffic from. Thanks! ....Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Multiple Internal links to same destinations
My company is redoing our homepage and there will be 4 links to our main play pages (5 games). 2 in the menu and 2 within the content. I was thinking I should no follow one of the links on the homepage + 1 in the menu so that we don't have link dilution from having multiple internal links to the same destination within 1 page. Does this make sense? Any downside of this or suggestions of a solution that may be more effective? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Do links from twitter count in SEOMoz's Toolbar link count?
I am using the Chrome extension and looking at a SERP, when a page is said to have 2000 incoming links, does that include tweets with a link back to this page? What about retweets. Are those counted separately or as one? And what about independent tweets that have exactly the same content (tweet text + link)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davhad0 -
Footer Link
Hello, Some of my hosted clients don't mind if I put a footer link on the bottom of their website. I would like to put a footer link that looks like Seomoz's - http://imgur.com/GrC8y Basically it would look like so: "Powered by "my company name". The world's #1 "keyword" provider (LOGO goes here) Here are my questions: 1. Would this hurt or help my rankings? 2. Should the logo be hosted by my clients so that a different ip is hosting my logo (where my image name will get picked up)? Or is it best to host it myself? 3. If my company name and keyword are getting linked, is that one link too many? 4. Is it a good idea to use a different keyword so that other keywords get picked up by SERPs, or should I set myself up on one keyword ? Thank you so much! Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240