I'm working on a new advert website and want to implement some good SEO URLs.
I got category URLs like:
/category
/category/sub-category
This seems ok. What about detail pages?
Option 1:
/announcements-and-notices/announcements-various/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
Option 2:
/adverts/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
In reality my website has a pretty long URLs due to multiple areas you can shop. So it would become:
/en/area-name/announcements-and-notices/announcements-various/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
/en/area-name/adverts/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
Which detail page would be a better URL? The first option seems to be better if the product has no long/good title. The second seems better as its the most relevant one and shortest especially with long category names.
I would like to hear your thoughts!
EDIT:
I found this two google docs:
http://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Fdocs%2Fsearch-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf&ei=lXyaT6T_L8zR4QSM4c2qDw&usg=AFQjCNEMj8KHxhxQz9cMLoMxMDiLdrAbJw
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76329
I think I will be going for /adverts. Anyone disagree?
i have seen many of SEO analysts miss something about optimizing their webpage and that is your page will be optimized for only some keywords not all keywords. it is not important how length is your URL. you should first analyze whether the contents in your webpage is rich enough to have such URL with these keywords or not. if the answer for every keyword is yes then the more length will give you the more rank.
I think you can even set your pages up in a way to use only the slug and skip the id, such as:
/adverts/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut
or even just:
/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut
like this and refer straight to the adverts controller and the advert itself, which has this slug assigned to it (the one with id 15880).
This way you'll have nice and clean URLs. Just assign and keep an unique slug for each advert and handle it using .htaccess, or dynamically inside the code of your site, if the system allows it.
Cheers.
Related
I am using ColdFusion 9.0.1.
I have a new web site that uses Bikes.cfm and Makers.cfm as template pages. I need to be able to pass BikeID and MakerID to both of the these pages, along with other variables. I don't want to use the Actual page name in the URL, such as this:
MyDomain.com/Bikes.cfm?BikeID=1234&MakerID=1234
I want my URL to look more like this:
MyDomain.com/?BikeID=1234&MakerID=1234
I need to NOT specify the page name in the URL.
I want these two URLs to access different data:
MyDomain.com/?BikeID=1234&MakerID=1234 // goes to bike page
MyDomain.com/?MakerID=1234&BikeID=1234 // goes to maker page
So, if BikeID appears in the URL before MakerID, go to the Bikes.cfm page. If MakerID appears before BikeID, go the Makers.cfm page.
Is there an easy and existing method to arrange the URL keys in such a way to have them point to the appropriate page?
Should I just parse the the URL as a list and determine the first ID and go to the appropriate page? Is there a better way?
Any thoughts or hints or ideas would be appreciated.
UPDATE -- It certainly appears that using the order of parameters in a URL is a bad idea for the following reasons:
1) many programs append variables to the URL
2) some programs may reorder the variables
3) GoogleBot may not consider order relevant and will most likely not index the site correctly.
Thanks to everyone who provided advice in a positive manner that my approach was probably a bad idea and would not produce the results I wanted. Thanks to everyone who suggested alternate means to produce the results I wanted.
If anyone of you positive people would like to put your positive comment/advice as an answer, I'd be happy to accept it as the answer.
Despite my grave misgivings about the whole idea, here's how I would do it if I were forced to do so:
index.cfm:
<cfswitch expression="#ListFirst(cgi.query_string, '=')#">
<cfcase value="BikeID">
<cfinclude template="Bikes.cfm">
</cfcase>
<cfcase value="MakerID">
<cfinclude template="Makers.cfm">
</cfcase>
<cfdefaultcase>
<cfinclude template="Welcome.cfm">
</cfdefaultcase>
</cfswitch>
Today I heard from my colleague that search bot can index pages with sequential ids.
Is it really happens ?
As an example checkout two urls:
http://sample.com/myProduct?id=765
and
http://sample.com/myProduct?id=35d6eb6c-97f6-4cde-997c-ade657c285d3
So, if search bots can figure out that my product id in url is sequential it can possibly index other products up and down the sequence ...
Have you ever heard anything like that ?
Whomever told you that is mistaken. Search engines will only index pages they know exist. So they won't keep changing the ID in those URLs just see if they find anything. So if you want those other pages to be indexed you should use a HTML sitemap or XML sitemap to tell the search engines where those pages are. Linking to them from other product pages is also a good idea.
I'm building a site that has items, with each item having a page, for example:
website.com/book/123
website.com/film/456
website.com/game/789
Each item can have multiple sub (and sub-sub, sub-sub-sub) pages, for example a book could have a blurb, a film could have a gallery and a game could also have a gallery.
My question is, does any sort of standard or best practice exist around structuring the URLs for pages associated with an item? For example:
website.com/film/456/gallery
Where the sub page comes after the item, or:
website.com/film/gallery/456/
where the item is the very last part of the URL.
Does anyone have any information on why which approach is best or if any web standard exists? It seems an obvious thing but I'm struggling to decide, I can think of pros and cons for each approach -- although I'm leaning towards the former option because it means the following user path would match the URL:
load website.com -> click "films" (website.com/films)-> click "a film" (website.com/film/123) -> click gallery (website.com/film/123/gallery)
but something about it seems... off, inconsistent maybe.
You are correct that the former URL is "better" and is more widely deployed. I don't think you would find this documented in any standard; it is rather more of a convention. Most articles and books covering REST do it that way.
The reason for this is, as you say, that the path components in the URL match the structure of resources and sub-resources. In particular, all of the following should be valid URLs:
website.com/
website.com/books
website.com/books/123
In particular, note that it is books/123, not book/123 like you have. I have seen the singular but IMHO the plural is better.
For the URL /books
a GET gets all books, but you can restrict the books with query parameters, e.g. /books?author=alice
a POST adds a new book (with a server-generated id).
For the URL /books/123
a GET gets that particular book
a PUT replaces the book with that id (or adds a book with that client-generated id)
Now if a book has blurbs and the blurbs are unique only to a particular book then you will add the following URLs:
website.com/books/123/blurbs
website.com/books/123/blurbs/72
You can do the same for films and galleries, provided each gallery belonged to a single film. But if galleries existed for multiple films, then you would make /galleries a top-level URL. Navigating from a film to a gallery would still be fine. You wouldn't have a structured URL. You would instead get all galleries containing pictures from film 456 via a GET to
website.com/galleries?film=456
The general rule is that if you have an ownership relation for the subresources you can use structured urls, but if there is a looser relationship among top-level items, query parameters are fine. Don't fall into the common misconception that RESTful URLs don't have query parameters; they do. :)
Now finally, to directly answer your question: website.com/films/galleries/456 is not a good URL IMHO because `website.com/films/galleries/ is not very useful. In fact I think it is rather ugly. What would it mean? All galleries? If so, it should be website.com/galleries.
Again I don't think this is standardized anywhere, but it feels very common and conventional.
I'm designing an ASP.NET MVC Application in which I've constructed multiple Action methods for a single view with [ActionName("Name-Of-Action")] attribute with each methods.
**E.g ViewName= Contact.aspx
controller Action methods like :
[ActionName("Contact-us")]
Public ActionResult Contact_us()
{return view("Contact");}
.
.
[ActionName("contact-now")]
Public ActionResult Contact_Now()
{return view("Contact");}
.
.**
and so on...
I wish to make this site SEO Friendly, Can you please mention the pros and cons of calling a single webpage with different ActionMethods(URLs) in terms of SEO Scenario.
Thanks in Advance..
As with #naveen as specified, you could be penlised for duplicate content. If you really need to have different URLs for your content, you would need to use a canonical link tag so search engines know that the content is the same as the other page, and is not considered duplicate.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/contact.aspx" />
This is quite prevalent in shopping cart systems, whereby you could have a product in multiple categories, but you make all of the content essentially canonical to a single URL, e.g.
1. http://www.mydomain.com/products/jellyfish.aspx
2. http://www.mydomain.com/products/sealife/jellyfish.aspx <-- canonically the same as #1
This will definitely affect you rankings adverslye if we sre talking not only about contact page. Your site will be penalized for duplicate content.
A good approach will be to fix one as ur desired url and Response.RedirectPermanent on the others. Stack Overflow deals with this issue like this.
Test for yourself by playing with our current url by deleting the slug or altering it. You will see 301(permanently redirected) issued in the console to the actual url.
Hope this helps.
I am wondering why the link to profile looks like:
http://stackoverflow.com/users/ID/NAME
not simply:
http://stackoverflow.com/users/ID
or even better:
http://stackoverflow.com/users/NAME
Can there be couple users with the same name? Or can one user have many names?
All SO-URLs are of the form id/description where the ID is unique and the description is optional. So /users/12890/arne-burmeister is the same as /users/12890/huhu and /questions/420380/why-does-the-link-to-the-user-profile-have-both-id-and-name is the same as /questions/420380/foo. The retrieval just uses the ID, but it is much better for google ranking, when the user/question/what-ever-should-be-found occurs in the URL (also for humans this is much more descriptive ;-).
By the way, retrieval by ID is faster than by such a large text string. And of course, the URL remains valid if someone changes their user name or the question.
The part after the last slash seems to be SEO related (i.e. making the url more expressive).
On the urls that I tested you could replace that part with whatever you wanted, it still worked. So the url http://stackoverflow.com/users/37086/othername still points to your profile.
I would assume doing a database lookup solely on the name string would be more expensive than a numerical lookup on the primary key, even if the name column is indexed. The name is then added on to make the URLs more user and SEO friendly.
There is a uservoice request for this. If you want this to happen, uservoice is the right place to discuss / vote up.
Your name on SO is not unique click on users and type Josh, there's a whole page of us. So you have to have the ID. As for why the name everyone else's guess is as good as mine.
Try changing or removing the name and see what happens.
I think it's just so that your URLs tell you what to expect, but the application doesn't need (or actually use) that information.
Amazon does something quite similar with their books, if I remember correctly: They've got both the ASIN (their internal ID) and the name of the book in the URL, but only ever look up the ASIN.
Just speculating: The ID allows very fast retrieval of the data the profile page presents. The name is just for humans and ignored since it's easier for me to no that you are rkj and I am phihag than that your ID is 37086 and mine is 35070.