Spaces in URL line
-
Hi Gurus,
I recently made the mistake of putting a space into a URL line between two words that make up my primary key word. Think
www.example.com/Jelly Donuts/mmmNice.php
instead of
www.example.com/JellyDonuts/mmmNice.php
This mistake now needed fixing to www.example.com/Jelly Donuts/mmmNice.php to pass W3, but has been in place for a while but most articles/documents under 'Jelly Donuts' are not ranking well (which is probably the obvious outcome of the mistake).
I am wondering whether the best solution from an SEO ranking viewpoint is to:
1. Change the article directory immediately to www.example.com/JellyDonuts/mmmNice.php and rel=canonical each article to the new correct URL. Take out the 'trash' using robots.txt
or to
301 www.example.com/Jelly Donut to the www.example.com/JellyDonut directory?
or perhaps something else?
Thanks in advance for your help with this sticky (but tasty) conundrum,
Brad
-
I would use a dash "-" Jelly-Donut and 301 to that page. Essentially only use a canonical when there is a direct reason for the similar content to be there like a dynamic database search and a "similar; SEO version. Or Pagination.
Give the Jelly%20Donuts/mmmNice.php will no longer be needed and an exact duplicate of its new location a 301 is best here.
-Phil
-
I agree with Webdeal, go with the 301
-
Hi BM7,
I would go with 301
Some more information for you - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Cheers
Dmitriy
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
-
Index Bloat: Canonicalize, Redirect or Delete URLs?
I was doing some simple on-page recommendations for a client and realized that they have a bit of a website bloat problem. They are an ecommerce shoe store and for one product, there could be 10+ URLs. For example, this is what ONE product looks like: example.com/products/shoename-color1 example.com/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/style/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/style/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/adifferentstyle/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/adifferentstyle/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/shop-latest-styles/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/shop-latest-styles/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/all/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/all/products/shoename-color2 ...and so on... all for the same shoe. They have about 20-30 shoes altogether, and some come in 4-5 colors. This has caused some major bloat on their site and I assume some confusion for the search engine. That said, I'm trying to figure out what the best way to tackle this is from an SEO perspective. Here's where I've gotten to so far: Is it better to canonicalize all URLs, referencing back to one "main" one, delete all bloat pages re-link everything to the main one(s), or 301 redirect the bloat URLs back to the "main" one(s)? Or is there another option that I haven't considered? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AJTSEO0 -
HTTP URL hangover after move to HTTPS
A clients site was moved to https recently. It's a small site with only 6 pages. One of the pages is to advertise an emergency service. HTTPS move worked fine. Submitted https to webmaster tools, submitted sitemap. 301 redirects. Rankings preserved. However, a few weeks later doing the site:example.com there are two pages for the emergency service. One says https the other is http. But the http one says the correct SEO title and the https one says an old SEO title. This wasn't expected. When you click the HTTP URL link it 301 redirects to the HTTPS url and the correct SEO title is displayed in the browser tab. When you click the HTTPS url link it returns a 200 and the correct SEO title is shown as expected in the browser tab. Anyone have any idea what is going on? And how to fix? Need to get rid of the HTTP URL but in the site search it contains the correct title. Plus- why is it there anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AL123al0 -
Changing URLs
URLs of my web pages are based on the titles of pages. For sampel, if a title page is called "product ABC", then the URL for this page is /product-abc. Google and all other search engines have indexed all pages. Now I want to change the titles of some sites. Should I change the URLs accordingly, or should I rather leave URLs as they are. SEO Best Practice says that keywords must be placed both in the title, and in the URL. I think that Google will think that pages have douplicate content with diffrent titles, and it comes to many 404 error, if I change the URLs. What do you recommend in this case?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kian_moz0 -
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Static looking URL - Best practices?
We are about to modify the structure of our dynamic URLs and I wonder what the latest and greatest is in terms of SEO-friendly dynamic URLs. Our thinking so far is to do something like: www.domain.com/products/state/city/first-search-parameter+second-parameter+third-parameter+any-additional-keywords that is, using + to separate search parameters and hyphens to separate words An example might be www.homes.com/listings/ca/san-francisco/single-family-home+3-bedrooms+2-bathrooms+swimming-pool-garden-wood-exterior I'm not an SEO expert so any help would be appreciated Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lln220 -
Image URL Change Catastrophe
We have a site with over 3mm pages indexed, and an XML sitemap with over 12mm images (312k indexed at peak). Last week our traffic dropped off a cliff. The only major change we made to the site in that time period was adding a DNS record for all of our images that moved them from a SoftLayer Object Storage domain to a subdomain of our site. The old URLs still work, but we changed all the links from across our site to the new subdomain. The big mistake we made was that we didn't update our XML sitemap to the new URLs until almost a week after the switch (totally forgot that they were served from a process with a different config file). We believe this was the cause of the issue because: The pages that dropped in traffic were the ones where the images moved, while other pages stayed more or less the same. We have some sections of our property where the images are, and have always been, hosted by Amazon and their rankings didn't crater. Same with pages that do not have images in the XML sitemap (like list pages). There wasn't a change in geographic breakdown of our traffic, which we looked at because the timing was around the same time as Pigeon. There were no warnings or messages in Webmaster Tools, to indicate a manual action around something unrelated. The number of images indexed in our sitemap according Webmaster Tools dropped from 312k to 10k over the past week. The gap between the change and the drop was 5 days. It takes Google >10 to crawl our entire site, so the timing seems plausible. Of course, it could be something totally unrelated and just coincidence, but we can't come up with any other plausible theory that makes sense given the timing and pages affected. The XML sitemap was updated last Thursday, and we resubmitted it to Google, but still no real change. Anyone had a similar experience? Any way to expedite the climb back to normal traffic levels? Screen%20Shot%202014-07-29%20at%203.38.34%20PM.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wantering0 -
"Category" word in URLs of blog is it SEO Friendly URL ??
Hello respected community members, I saw many times that "Category" word comes in URL of blog. So my que is that is this negative for SEO or Positive. & if we don't wanna to come CATEGORY in URL how can we remove while URL Optimization ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sourabhrana390 -
URL for New Product
Hi, We run an established website (mindflash.com) selling online training software. We are getting ready to launch a new section of the site where our users can sell their own online training programs. This will be branded as the 'marketplace'. This section will have a main page, category pages, tag pages, search and individual course pages. In our URL structure, I'd love to target the word 'training courses' but I don't want to neglect the product brand either. Is it better to use /training-courses in the marketplace urls or to use /marketplace? Or is it better to use both like /marketplace-training-courses or /marketplace/training-courses? Option 1: Example main section page: mindflash.com/training-courses Example category page: mindflash.com/training-courses/software-training Option 2: Example main section page: mindflash.com/marketplace Example category page: mindflash.com/marketplace/software-training Option 3: Example main section page: mindflash.com/marketplace-training-courses Example category page: mindflash.com/marketplace-training-courses/software-training Option 4: Example main section page: mindflash.com/marketplace/training-courses Example category page: mindflash.com/marketplace/training-courses/software-training Which option is better and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0