Real Vs. Virtual Directory Question
-
Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for the assistance. We are reformatting the URL structure of our very content rich website (thousands of pages) into a cleaner stovepipe model. So our pages will have a URL structure something like http://oursite.com/topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html etc.
My question is… is there any additional benefit to having the path /topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html literally exist on our server as a real directory? Our plan was to just use HTACCESS to point that URL to a single script that parses the URL structure and makes the page appropriately.
Do search engine spiders know the difference between these two models and prefer one over the other? From our standpoint, managing a single HTACCESS file and a handful of page building scripts would be infinitely easier than a huge, complicated directory structure of real files. And while this makes sense to us, the HTACCESS model wouldn't be considered some kind of black hat scheme, would it?
Thank you again for the help and looking forward to your thoughts!
-
At a fundamental level, you are keeping the data somewhere and it is rendered correctly. In a CMS this data is stored in a database completely outside search engine view. So it does not matter if it is in database or in physical directory somehow. So there is no benefit in keeping the structure same physically.
Having said that and my own experience (we manage website with millions of pages) managing this using HTACCESS script is NOT a good idea. You will be limited by what you can do and maintaining will be quite challenging.
I strongly suggest consider moving to a CMS (like drupal) and store all you content inside a database and the CMS script takes care of HTACCESS plus gives other goodies. There are several tool available to get your content from disk into a database.
-
Search engines can't tell the difference so all good.
-
I believe that the preferred method is in the HTAccess file. When we reformatted the URLs on our site this was the most efficient, cleanest way to do it. This kind of Dynamic Redirect protects you from 404 pages and losing your page values. I didn't see any negative effects using this method of restructure. I had about 6000 pages that each had to change URL, it was a nightmare. We migrated to a completely new platform and file server, so we had to change URLs.
I hope that is helpful. I don't see one method benefiting your engines more than the other. I would suggest doing whatever will be the least amount of work, will be the cleanest way to do it and will in the long run keep your URLs clean and without erroneous information.
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
-
SEMrush vs GA rankings drop since February and December 2018?
I am wondering if someone can help me understand what's going on with our site. We had a 50% drop in the number of keywords ranking from February 2018 to October in SEMrush. Looking at SEMrush, I am actually seeing a drop after 2/208 with many competitor's sites as well. We saw moderate improvement in November, but around December 6th, we started seeing a decline the number of keywords ranking again. In Google Analytics, there was a 10-15% drop in traffic after February 2018, which recovered September to December, but since early December, there is a drop again. In GWT, I am seeing something similar to analytics with impressions and clicks. We have done some SEO the past couple of years, but we have taken care to do things white-hat so as not to incur a penalty. We have also invested in writing content for our blog on a regular basis. Any thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kekepeche0 -
Why there is lot of difference in Domain Authority vs majestic trust flow strange???
Hello all I want to ask you why there is difference in DA authority vs majestic trust authority as both of these companies say they have the best authority alogrithm see the below link for refrence. http://wp.auburn.edu/bassclub/next-meeting-1-28-2014/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adnan11010 -
G.A. question - removing a specific page's data from total site's results?
I hope I can explain this clearly, hang in there! One of the clients of the law firm I work for does some SEO work for the firm and one thing he has been doing is googling a certain keyword over and over again to trick google's auto fill into using that keyword. When he runs his program he generates around 500 hits to one of our attorney's bio pages. This happens once or twice a week, and since I don't consider them real organic traffic it has been really messing up my GA reports. Is there a way to block that landing page from my overall reports? Or is there a better way to deal with the skewed data? Any help or advice is appreciated, I am still so new to SEO I feel like a lot of my questions are obvious, but please go easy on me!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MyOwnSEO0 -
Can anyone explain some below SEO questions ?
Can we do link building like directory, article, press releases, classifieds, business listing, social bookmarking etc. We need to check DA, Alexa, Page Rank, cBlock IP before publishing any kind of Link but how much Max or Min. no. should be for consider any website like DA should be min 20-30-40 etc.. How can consider a natural links? Which type anchor text should be in any kind of links may be directory etc. In website interlinking we should put Exact Links or no need to put any links For.ex.my website is abc.com.au then we can put link for Website Design keywords or Should be long tail keyword. How can we do content marketing means we should post blog in internal website or need to create External Blog like BlogSpot, WordPress. In blog we should put any keyword link OR should be post without links. We can put link on no follow website. Why more website coming on Google first page but they are doing Spammy links like exact keywords links, unnatural links etc.. Thanks, Akhilesh
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
Suggestion for Link Directory Script?
I own a subscription to PHP Link Directory but was wondering if anyone could suggest an alternative link directory script/software/service to PHPLD. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | fergusonconsulting0 -
Is Best of the Web a good directory to pay to be listed on?
We are currently paying to have a listing in the directory Best of the Web. Should I be paying to renew our listing in this directory?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | djlittman0 -
Does the SEOmoz Suggested Directory List Need to be Updated?
So, since Google updated their link schemes page (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356) with avoid using "Low-quality directories", I've been thinking a lot about what makes a directory "low-quality". Obviously, this is important, or Google wouldn't have mentioned it. I was wondering if someone could explain to me how some of the directories suggested by SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/directories are NOT low-quality, specifically some of the ones marked "General". The page lists stuff like busybits.com, for instance. One that I guess many are aware of, and yea it has a high home page PageRank, and it's got some history, and it's human-edited, ok great. But does it actually add any value to anyone that's not just looking to get a link? A page like http://busybits.com/Business/Others/2/ having (dofollow) listings like "Phone cards, Calling cards" "Insurance in Canada" .... ect. It just looks like an SEO backlink hub. No value at all to a user trying to discover new sites/content. Anyway, back to my main question, how is something like this NOT "low-quality"? Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MadeLoud4 -
Ranking questions
We have questions about our ranking and would like some advice.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whiteflash0