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.
Structuring URL's for better SEO
-
Hello,
We were rolling our fresh urls for our new service website.
Currently we have our structure as www.practo.com/health/dental/clinic/bangalore
We like to have it as www.practo.com/health/dental-clinic-bangalore
Can someone advice us better which one of the above structure would work out better and why?
Should this be a focus of attention while going ahead since this is like a search engine platform for patients looking out for actual doctors.
Thanks,
Aditya
-
Your next route would be to set up a Google Places for your location so that you return in the local searches for where you are based. So when the search term 'Dental Clinic Bangalore' is searched for your website will appear.
After that for specific regions, have different pages on your site such as www.practo.com/health/dental-clinic-jayangar.
This means that the page name is dental-clinic-jayangar as opposed to www.practo.com/health/dental/clinic/jayangar where the site structure leads to a page name of just jayangar.If the page name is the search term, you stand in a lot better for ranking in the SERP.
-
Thanks.
We would have specific urls for eg: www.practo.com/health/dental-clinic-jayangar
So Jayanagar becomes our Locality specific to Bangalore and then a Dental Clinic becomes a widely searched key term on the SERP.
You are also suggesting to base urls on local key terms searches? Say dental clinic koramangala has a good key term search result from the keyword tool - so here we could base our urls as /dental-clinic-koramangala?
Why not practo.com/health/dental/clinic/koramangala - is this an un-appropriate way of going about url structuring?
-
Hi,
Firstly you have to figure out which search time you want to be found for. Having bangalore as a page name in the first instance would not be focused enough at all. You need to refine this keyword.
The second URL structure would present your search term as 'dental clinic bangalore' and would be much more focused and refined. There are local searches in India for that key term according to Google Keyword Tool so that would definitely be the way to go forward.
Make sure that you set up 301 redirects from the old URL structure to the new URL structure to maintain any link juice and you will be on your way. For a redirect I would typically give it a month until the 301 redirect starts passing through the old page authority.
Good luck.
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
-
SEO + Structured Data for Metered Paywall
I have a site that will have 90% of the content behind a metered paywall. So all content is accessible in a metered way. All users who aren't logged in will have access to 3 articles (of any kind) in a 30 day period. If they try to access more in a 30 day period they will hit a paywall. I was reading this article here on how to handle structured data with Google for content behind a paywall: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/paywalls-seo-strategy/311359/However, the content is not ALWAYS behind a paywall, since it is metered. So if a new user comes to the site, they can see the article (regardless of what it is). Is there a different way to handle content that will be SOMETIMES behind a paywall bc of a metered strategy? Theoretically I want 100% of the content indexed and accessible in SERPs, it will just be accessible depending on the user's history (cookies) with the site. I hope that makes sense.
Technical SEO | | triveraseo0 -
SERP result (URL) doesn't change after a 301
A couple of months ago there was a result in Google for our branded search term which wasn't the 'official' URL, actually the result shown in the SERP was www.mycompany-ip.nl. We've applied a 301 redirect of this URL to the 'official' URL which is a subdomain: department.mycompany.nl. From Google the redirect is obviously working, but up until now, I don't see Google replacing the incorrect URL by the correct URL. I am wondering what to do to make the result correct. André
Technical SEO | | ConclusionDigital0 -
How Does Dynamic Content for a Specific URL Impact SEO?
Example URL: http://www.sja.ca/English/Community-Services/Pages/Therapy Dog Services/default.aspx The above page is generated dynamically depending on what province the visitor visits from. For example, a visitor from BC would see something quite different than a visitor from Nova Scotia; the intent is that the information shown should be relevant to the user of that province. How does this effect SEO? How (or from what location) does Googlebot decide to crawl the page? I have considered a subdirectory for each province, though that comes with its challenges as well. One such challenge is duplicate content when different provinces may have the same information for some pages. Any suggestions for this?
Technical SEO | | ey_sja0 -
Are Collapsible DIV's SEO-Friendly?
When I have a long article about a single topic with sub-topics I can make it user friendlier when I limit the text and hide text just showing the next headlines, by using expandable-collapsible div's. My doubt is if Google is really able to read onclick textlinks (with javaScript) or if it could be "seen" as hidden text? I think I read in the SEOmoz Users Guide, that all javaScript "manipulated" contend will not be crawled. So from SEOmoz's Point of View I should better make use of old school named anchors and a side-navigation to jump to the sub-topics? (I had a similar question in my post before, but I did not use the perfect terms to describe what I really wanted. Also my text is not too long (<1000 Words) that I should use pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev" attributes.) THANKS for every answer 🙂
Technical SEO | | inlinear0 -
Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's
I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience. This is where my head starts to hurt! Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size). My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this: a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page. b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right. Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page? I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. . Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well? Kind regards Tom
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Javascript to manipulate Google's bounce rate and time on site?
I was referred to this "awesome" solution to high bounce rates. It is suppose to "fix" bounce rates and lower them through this simple script. When the bounce rate goes way down then rankings dramatically increase (interesting study but not my question). I don't know javascript but simply adding a script to the footer and watch everything fall into place seems a bit iffy to me. Can someone with experience in JS help me by explaining what this script does? I think it manipulates the reporting it does to GA but I'm not sure. It was supposed to be placed in the footer of the page and then sit back and watch the dollars fly in. 🙂
Technical SEO | | BenRWoodard1 -
Optimal Structure for Forum Thread URL
For getting forum threads ranked, which is best and why? site.com**/topic/**thread-title-goes-here site.com**/t/**thread-title-goes-here site.com**/**thread-title-goes-here I'd take comfort in knowing that SEOmoz uses the middle version, except that "q" is more meaningful to a human than "t". The last option seems like the best bet overall, except that users could potentially steal urls that I may want to use in the future. My old structure was site.com/forum/topic/TOPIC_ID-thread-title-goes-here so obviously any of those would be a vast improvement, but I might as well make the best choice now so I only have to change once.
Technical SEO | | PatrickGriffith0 -
Blank pages in Google's webcache
Hello all, Is anybody experiencing blanck page's in Google's 'Cached' view? I'm seeing just the page background and none of the content for a couple of my pages but when I click 'View Text Only' all of teh content is there. Strange! I'd love to hear if anyone else is experiencing the same. Perhaps this is something to do with the roll out of Google's updates last week?! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | A_Q
Elias0