Were our URLs setup correctly?
-
The person who build our site setup a lot of the pages like: domain/location/city/title tag For example: http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/
I know the length is too long and it seems entirely unnecessary to me. Many of the pages I have created since I got here are just domain/title tag (which is almost always city-field of law-attorneys-lawyers). However, when I compare the original pages with the new ones, they both rank similarly. Given what a pain it is to change urls, I'm not sure if it would be worth it to shorten them all or not. However, I would like to know if the way there were setup originally makes sense for some reason I don't understand.
Thanks,
Ruben
-
Thanks everyone! I think I'll go ahead and try to make the change for at least some of the urls that aren't performing well to see if shortening them helps. I'll report back what I find.
Thanks again!
Ruben
-
Hi Ruben
Key word stuffing is a big no no well documented by Google. It would be a wise decision to first shorten the link and to make sure the link is relevant to your page (just be natural). If you are registered on google places, your registered address will get picked up in the Tampa area.
go from this http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/
to this
http://www.kempruge.com/personal-injury-legal-attorneys/
If you have had this long link appearing for a while - no love from Google and i would strongly advise your change this.
Hope this helps?
Gary
-
Just popping in to add my voice to the choir. I agree with the consensus here that the URLs are too long. You are smart to be concerned about overoptimization, and I think it would be worth the effort to create new URLs and redirect the old ones.
-
You are right! The URLs are too long and unnecessary!
The shorten URL would make more sense to users as well as search engines. The current version seems like you are trying to stuffed the keywords within the URL where as shorting them will kill this factor and it will look more natural to SEs as well as end user.
My advice would be to go with shortening them and make it look real as stuffing is something Google don’t like so you might get hurt in the longer run!
Hope this helps!
-
Ruben,
I'd agree with your assessment that those URL formats are too long and unnecessary. This URL structure looks a lot like keyword stuffing and EMD (exact-match domain) as well as PMD (partial-match domain) were valued by the people who made the website. In their defense, depending on how old the website is, those extra keywords may have actually helped the pages rank better for relevant queries years ago.
I wouldn't worry too much about redirecting those URLs or changing them today, however. I suppose you could but today search engines are far more sophisticated. I don't think it'd be a great investment of your time.
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
-
Missing trailing slash in URL on subpages resulting in Moz PA of 1
Even here in moz community I am noticing it. Is it really a factor to have an ending slash on the page? Does it make a difference? Our website has a homepage PA of 63, DA of 56 but all of our sub-pages are just 1 and they have been up for 4 months.
Web Design | | serverleap1 -
Pulling old site-map and URL structure of a site
Hey guys how do I pull an old sitemap or URL structure of a site ! This company I am helping out . Build a new site without any 301 redirect ! It's been about 2 months and hosting company sent me. SQL database file said we basically need to build another site ! Wondering if there are any other ways to see what exact urls were existent before their change over
Web Design | | BizDetox0 -
Question Mark In URL??
So I am looking at a site for a client, and I think I already have my answer, but wanted to check with you guys. First off the site is in FLASH and HTML. I told the client to dump the flash site, but she isn't willing right now. So the URLS are generated like this. Flash: http://www.mysite.com/#/page/7ca2/wedding-pricing/ HTML: http://www.mysite.com/?/page/7ca2/wedding-pricing/ checking the site in Google with a site:mysite, none of the interior pages are indexed at all. So that is telling me that Google is pretty much ignoring everything past the # or ?. Is that correct? My recommendation is to dump the flash site and redo the URLS in a SEo friendly format.
Web Design | | netviper0 -
Changing URL's for a website redesign
Hi folks, We're redesigning our website and looking for some advice on how changing our URL's would affected our rankings. If the page URLs are changing how can we carry out redirects to avoid losing any SEO rank? Thanks, Ross
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
Correct Canonical Reference
Aloha, This is probably a noob question, but here we go: I got a CMS e-commerce, which does not allow static "rel=canonical" declaration in the header and can only work with third-party modules (xml packages) that append "rel=canonical" to all pages dynamic pages within the URL. As a result, I have pages I'm declaring incomplete rel="canonical" as such: Instead of: rel="canonical" src="www.domainname.com/category.aspx" I get: rel="canonical" src="/category.aspx" Coincidentally (or not), after the implementation of the canonical tag, pages that were continuously increasing in rankings started dropping, and, within a week, disappeared from the index completely. Could the drop be a result of my canonical links pointing to incomplete URLs? If so, by fixing this issue, do I stand a chance of recovering my pages' SERPs?
Web Design | | dimanyc0 -
Page Title or Search Friendly Urls?
We are currently auditing our website as part of our SEO strategy. One item which hascome up is the importance of search friendly urls against the search engine friendly page titles. Do url's or page titles carry more relevance than the other in search engines? Obviously the ideal would be to have both to maximise search impact but do either carry more importance. Thanks
Web Design | | bwfc770 -
Javascript changing URL - Thoughts?
So, our developer just created a player at the bottom of this site I work for. It's not really important what it is. The thing is, when you go to our home page now, the javascript changes the url from www.site.com to www.site.com/home It's not actually redirected or anything (no 301, it's just the javascript doing this), but I'm worried that if someone links back to our site they're going to surely pull that URL to point back to, which is wrong. Also, when you go to a category, the URL changes from www.site.com/category to www.site.com/home#category. Again, it's not a redirect but I'm still worried people will link back to this since it's on the entire site now... I'm suggesting that we turn off this new feature until we find a workaround. I just wanted to confirm with you guys that this is best. Thanks
Web Design | | poolguy0 -
Custom URL's with Bigcommerce Issue (Is it worth it?)
We're building out a store in Bigcommerce, who for all intensive purposes is perfect for SEO besides the fact that you can not change the URL's to be custom. My question is, does this kill the SEO value of bigcommerce, despite everything else being great? So for example the URL's for a category page would be something like this www.mysite.com/categories/keyword and the product URL's are pulled in by product name, so product URL's could be something like www.mysite.com/products/Product-Description-Long-223.html (notice the words will be capitalized and their is no way to remove the trailing .html) I could go with Interspire (the liscenced version of Bigcommerce) or Magento so I can custom edit this stuff. But then its a lot more work for my employee's on the buildout.
Web Design | | iAnalyst.com0