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.
Post url not matching with post title ( wordpress)
-
I have this site called searchoflife.com on which I have noticed the post urls are not matching with the post title. For Example:Post Title - A Dialogue With NaturePost URL - http://searchoflife.com/dialogue-nature-2013-09-12 Words like 'A' and 'with' are not present in the post URL. This has been the trend since a few days. After investigating I found out that it was due to my plugin SEO ultimate which is actually creating post slugs automatically for the post urls. So my question is whether it is advisable to use post slugs instead of the full post url. Does it affect the SERPS for my site?
-
Hello Again,
Last night I searched a few keywords and noticed a post which is ranking on the first place at first position. Now this post is having the post slug instead of the entire URL. Here is the keyword
liberation from innate darkness - 1st position
empathy is the liberation - 5th position
Post Title - Empathy is the liberation from Innate Darkness
Post URL - http://searchoflife.com/empathy-liberation-innate-darkness-2013-09-02
Also I checked on my localhost after disabling the slug optimizer. It seems that wordpress is automatically redirecting to the new URL so it won't be a problem to change the older post slug URLS yo complete URLs. But I feel I won't touch those posts which are already having good rankings with post slugs. Any suggestions?
-
I haven't thoroughly checked the newer posts as such. Unfortunately when I noticed this change it had already started and I thought it to be an update of Wordpress 3.6. Wordpress it seems has its own post slug since quite sometime. But incidently the update of SEO ultimate plugin too coincided with the wordpress update. So I wasn't sure. Later on another site I noticed the same type of behaviour which was using SEO Yoast plugin. So I don't know why all the top SEO plugins are automatically switching to this. I did search on Google regarding this but haven't found a comprehensive answer.
-
How are your rankings and more importantly traffic generated by these posts doing? You are right you need to be sure before taking this action and to be honest I think there is a good chance that the difference will be negligible even though I think we both agree that we would prefer the full post title URL. If we strip it back to a very base level then you are getting your most important keywords in the URL which is helping your page relevancy so why make this extra work for yourself.
-
I too am not that comfortable with the post slugs personally. But now that there are already a decent amount of posts (More than 50) in that format which are indexed on Google. If I do disable the post slug option I would then have to change all my urls to the post title (i.e if it really does hamper SERPS), then will have to redirect all those URLS to the new URLs. So need to be sure enough to take this action.
Also one of my posts with the keyword 'astrobiological approach' when searched on Google ranks first in the search results. But if you notice that particular url is having the entire post title. However I'm not sure whether the URL itself had a role in the ranking. Please guide me. Thanks.
-
Hi - I tend to always set the urls to be the full post title. You will also notice that the likes of Moz does this as well if you look at this post for instance. Your plugin is trying to be clever as there is thought that having too many hyphens and words in your url will dilute the effectiveness of your main keywords once you start going over 4 or 5 words, depending where the keywords occur in the title. I believe Matt Cutts addressed this in a webmaster video many moons ago and I think the main conclusion was that having too many hyphens in your URL may look a little spammy to searchers and put them off clicking on your result in the SERPs. However nowadays this is a common practice and I don''t think this has negative impact on click through rates from the SERPs. If I were you I would look at my URL matching my post title personally. Small words such as A and with help to add context to your page contents in my opinion.
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
-
Query for paginated URLs - Shopify
Hi there, /collections/living-room-furniture?page=2
On-Page Optimization | | williamhuynh
/collections/living-room-furniture?page=3
/collections/living-room-furniture?page=4 Is that ok to make all the above paginated URLs canonicalised with their main category /collections/living-room-furniture Also, does it needs to be noindex, follow as well? Please advice, thank you!1 -
How does Google treat Dynamic Titles?
Let's say my website can be accessed in only 3 states Colorado, Arizona and Ohio. I want to display different information to each visitor based on where they are located. For this I would also like the title to change based on their location. Not quite sure how Google we treat the title and rank the site.... Any resources you can provide would be helpful. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Firestarter-SEO0 -
Url structure with dash or slash
Hi There We have a content website. We don't rank well category image related searches but we get quite good traffic for those keywords. Those keywords are mostly like "category images". We want to change our url structure and we have 2 options now. 1- domain.com/category/category-images 2-domain.com/category/images option 1 repeats the category name so it looks spammy option 2 doesn't really have the keyword. any ideas which one tho choose? Thanks! ps: we don't want to use domain.com/category-images (too many root link)
On-Page Optimization | | muminaydin0 -
Punctuation at the Start of Page Titles
one of my clients appears to be using an exclamation mark (e.g. "! Graphic Prints By Mirrorin - Fun Childrens Graphic Prints") and to be completely honest, I have no idea if this is bad practice or if it wont have any affect from an SEO point of view? Any help would be appreciated because it is site wide, therefore if it is an issue I would like to be able to get it sorted asap! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ZaddleMarketing0 -
Wordpress category links not working
Hi All of sudden, my category links are not working. Any tips on figuring out what's causing this? Looks like permalink problem with newer wordpress version. I turned off all the plugins see if this cause any problems. Still not being able to find any option. Here's my site http://www.hibebefetaldoppler.com/fetal-doppler-questions-and-answers/ Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | BistosAmerica0 -
Title and Heading Tags
Firstly I would like to comment on how helpful this site is. I haven't posted much before but have been reading tonnes of answers for many months now and have been finding it really useful. I used the SEOmoz scanner and the main problem highlighted was duplicate content so I started to add 'customer product reviews' I had received and unique 'further information' to each page (hopefully this was the right thing to do to solve duplicate content! : ) ) Then I looked at heading and title tags. Currently I set title tags for each product page to be "Brand Name- Product Name" but after doing some research we are thinking of putting Keyword Description of Product | Product Name | Brand Name (around 60 characters long). So is this the advised thing to do and create unique titles that are relevant to each specific product page for over 200 pages we have? In addition, any advice on setting optimum tags would be great. We keep reading varying tips online. I gather ideally h1 needs to be a shorter keyword rich version of the title tag? Many Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | jannkuzel0 -
How to optimize a wordpress blog
I’m helping a client optimize a word press blog, and I’m not that familiar with Wordpress. The site is www.athleticfoodie.com. At first I was treating it like a normal website, where the categories would be optimized like pages on a website. However, I now realize that categories don’t have any content on them, so I can’t really optimize anything other than the names. Are the following things the best way to handle on-page optimization for a blog? Optimizing the homepage & domain: Find ways to incorporate the most important keywords into the elements on the main frame of the site: Navigation menu, Widgets, Category names, Alt Images. Optimizing the categories: For the posts within the categories (i.e., photos), work to make sure the category keywords are worked into the post titles (but not too much to seem spammy) Optimizing specific posts. Work keywords into the text and images. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | EricVallee340 -
Using commas in the title tag?
Is there a disadvantage/advantage to using commas to separate words in the title tag. Which will be more effective as a title tag: "keyword1 keyword2 - Brand" OR "keyword1, keyword2 - Brand"?
On-Page Optimization | | Audiohype0
