Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I Parent/Child my Website Pages (need help with terminology too)
-
Hello I have a website that I am trying to SEO optimise.
The current structure of the site is that all pages are linked directly after the domain:
example: www.domain.com**/page01** www.domain.com**/page02** The website is however logically organised in the following form:
www.domain.com**/page01/page02** Sometimes the parenting goes to 3 levels: (please help me with the right term here)Domain
↳ Page001
↳ Page002
↳Page003My question is: should keep the current structure, or is it worth the effort to re-link the website in a parented way. Are there any benefites to one or the other, and could you point to some video tutorials or documentation to read.
-
Hi Niki, I think that your strategy to maintain the url short is good, it's always best to give short urls if they're descriptive enough. Normally the best thing to do is to give to users an URL which let them understand what a page is about without clicking into it, this may be beneficial also in linkbuilding since people linking to you with your url will involve also some traffic if the linking site is thematically related.
About the structure I think that 3 categories are not that much, it really depends on how many products or child pages you have. The best thing to do is to organize them in a way which is thematically organized having all your page not more than 3-4 clicks away from your home, in that way you'll be sure that google can easily find and crawl them frequently because a page deep in your website may not be found or crawled that much.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Non-Existent Parent Pages SEO Impact
Hello, I'm working with a client that is creating a new site. They currently are using the following URL structure: http://clientname.com/products/furry-cat-muffins/ But the landing page for the directory /products/ does not actually have any content. They have a similar issue for the /about/ directory where the menu actually sends you to /about/our-story/ instead of /about/. Does it hurt SEO to have the URL structure set up in this way and also does it make sense to create 301 redirects from /about/ to /about/our-story/?
Technical SEO | | Alder0 -
Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?
If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....
Technical SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Disallow: /404/ - Best Practice?
Hello Moz Community, My developer has added this to my robots.txt file: Disallow: /404/ Is this considered good practice in the world of SEO? Would you do it with your clients? I feel he has great development knowledge but isn't too well versed in SEO. Thank you in advanced, Nico.
Technical SEO | | niconico1011 -
I need help with a PHP canonical URL tags
I found a little difficult for me to do a canonical tag in my PHP. On-Page Report Card We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. I don't know how to tidy my PHP Any suggestion.
Technical SEO | | lnietob0 -
How does Google find /feed/ at the end of all pages on my site?
Hi! In Google Webmaster Tools I find *.../feed/ as a 404 page in crawl errors. The problem is that none of these pages exist and they have no inbound links (except the start page). FYI, it´s a wordpress site. Example: www.mysite.com/subpage1/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage2/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage3/feed/ etc Does Google search for /feed/ by default or why do I keep getting these 404´s every day?
Technical SEO | | Vivamedia0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
Nofollow and ecommerce cart/checkout pages
Hi!! Another noob question: Should I be nofollowing my site's cart and checkout pages? Or as SEs can't get to the checkout pages without either logging in or completing the form is it something I shouldn't worry about? Have read things saying both. Not sure which is correct. Thank you! Appreciate the help. Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0