Stripping Parent Pages from Slugs
-
Hi
Basically my wordpress site exists of 4 Parent Categories, each of them having + 50 subpages (or child pages) in them. Some of these child pages have other child pages in them. This creates URL's (or slugs) looking like this:
mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops
I found a plugin that 301 redirects a page to any given url. This way i can make www.mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops redirect to mydomain.com/new-york-seed-shops, only with the purpose to have shorter links and the keyword appearing 'earlier' in the url.
Another option to shorten the url's is to shorten the parent pages slugs, something like this: mydomain.com/seeds/exotic/new-york. Only downside is that the keyword for the parent pages themselves won't appear in the slug anymore. The keywords will still be there in the Title, Description and H1 tag, but not in the url. so if my keyword is stunflower seeds, instead of having www.mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds i'll have www.mydomain.com/seeds
What would you do?
1: Leave urls like this - really long urls, keywords don't come 'early' in url
mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops2: Make child pages 301 redirect - short urls, but url structure is lost (parent pages don't show in the url)mydomain.com/new-york-seed-shop3: User shorter slugs for Parent Pages - to me looks like the best option, but then i'll loose my keywords in the slugs for parent pages.mydomain.com/seeds/exotic/new-york4: Yes there's even a 4th option, again the example of how my slugs look now:
mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops
I could use the plugin to redirect every child page (for example new-york-seed-shops) to this: mydomain.com/seeds/exotic/new-york-seed-shops. But i don't know if it's okay to redirect to different parent pages with wordpress...I'd also like to know if backlinks to 301 redirect pages count for the page they redirect to. And if they have the same impact/strength as links that link directly to the page.Thanks in advance
-
Hi Freek,
Here are my thoughts :
1 : Might look like a spammy keyword stuffed url to users and search engines
2 : Short and sweet, you do lose the idea of parent/child relation, but I think it's the most clean and optimized one (as long as you keep it short)
3 : Less descriptive, but looks less keyword optimized and might help to get breadcrumbs because of the parent/child relation.
4 : Not that I can think of, you might want to try both, number 2 and 3 on a certain part of your website, track your rankings and see wich ones goes up and wich ones stays the same or decrease. Then you should be able to decide wich one is the best.
Also, don't forget to ask website's customer what they think would be the best URLs, their opinion also counts!
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.
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
-
Too many SEO changes needed on a page. Create a new page?
I've been doing some research on a keyword with Page Optimization. I'm finding there's a lot of changes suggested. I'm wondering that because of the amount of changes required is it better to create a new page entirely from scratch that has all the suggestions implemented OR change the current page? Thanks, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris29181 -
Rel=Alternate on Paginated Pages
I've a question about setting up the rel=alternate & rel=canonical tags between desktop and a dedicated mobile site in specific regards to paginated pages. On the desktop and mobile site, all paginated pages have the rel=canonical set towards a single URL as per usual. On the desktop site though, should the rel=alternate be to the relevant paginated page on the mobile site (ie a different rel=alternate on every paginated page) or to a single URL just as it is vice versa. Cheers chaps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob1 -
Duplicate Content for Deep Pages
Hey guys, For deep, deep pages on a website, does duplicate content matter? The pages I'm talk about are image pages associated with products and will never rank in Google which doesn't concern me. What I'm interested to know though is whether the duplicate content would have an overall effect on the site as a whole? Thanks in advance Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao1 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Rel=canonical on image pages
Hi, Im working on a Wordpress hosted blog site. I recently did a "site:search" in Google for a specific article page to make sure it was getting crawled, and it returned three separate URLs in the search results. One was the article page, and the other two were the URLs that hosted the images that are found in the article. Would you suggest adding the rel=canonical tag to the pages that host the images so they point back to the actual context article page? Or are they fine being left alone? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing. Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing under same keywords " parts washers" Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhart0 -
Google Filter? Drop from top first page to bottom second page?
My site has dropped from the first page top spots to the bottom second page, about 2 month ago. From time to time it reappears in the first page, is this some kind of google filter? How do I solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ofer230 -
Why duplicate content for same page?
Hi, My SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic warn me about duplicate content. However, to me the content is not duplicated. For instance it would give me something like: (URLs/Internal Links/External Links/Page Authority/Linking Root Domains) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110516 /1/1/31/2 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110711 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110811 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110911 0/0/1/0 Why is this seen as duplicate content when it is only URL with campaign tracking codes to the same content? Do I need to clean this?Thanks for answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0