URL SEO for e-commerce website products - url

I'm currently working out the best setup for URLs on an e-commerce site I'm working on.
The site sells games and as you may already know games can come with demos and multiple dlc packs. On the site a game, a demo and dlc all have their own individual pages.
I have designed the following urls... but can't figure out which one is better and whether potentially they might be too long.
Option One:
.../product/the-game-name/ // the full game
.../product/the-game-name/demo/ // the demo
.../product/the-game-name/dlc/name-of-dlc/ // the specific dlc
Option Two:
.../game/the-game-name/ // the full game
.../demo/the-game-name/ // the demo
.../dlc/the-game-name/name-of-dlc/ // the specific dlc
In both examples "..." is purely the domain name: i.e. http://mysite.com
If anyone can tell me the pros and cons of either option, or whether there are better alternatives that would be handy.

I'd avoid extending the URL with things like /product/ if possible. It doesn't really add anything.
Otherwise, I prefer the first option as it seems more natural.
You may also want to be consistent with using folders (ends with a slash) or files, don't mix.
.../the-game-name/ # the full game
.../the-game-name/demo/ # the demo
.../the-game-name/dlc/name-of-dlc/ # the specific dlc
Your use of dashes for spaces is good.

I've always been told that you want your key phrase rich URLs as close to the root as possible. To use hyperbole, domain.com/manufacturers/nintendo/products/super-mario-brothers is less effective than domain.com/super-mario-brothers or domain.com/nintendo/super-mario-brothers.
With the slashes, I assume you have IIS7. If you don't, you can download the Rewrite Module 2.0, and once installed, click it, then click add rule, there's a module right on the interface for taking care of trailing slashes throughout your solution.
After you've downloaded the Rewrite module, I would also recommend the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit that will offer suggestions as well. Some of the suggestions may be feeble, but some may be worth looking at. For instance, maybe you have your pageheaders styled a certain way but you don't have h1 tags, which SEs like.
Lastly, none of the rewrite modules mean anything if you don't get your hands dirty and go out there and make backlinks. Submit your sitemap.xml to google, your urllist.txt to yahoo/bing, and then backlink. Put your site in as many free directories as possible if they're relevant to your industry -- don't "link farm", though. Make a notepad file with a 30 or 40 word description with key phrases from your site, and just copy/paste 'em into backlinking directories. The most important backlinks are the ones that are pertinent to your product.

Related

URL structure for multilingual websites

I'm developing a SPA web app and it will support various languages. It is build with AngularJS and I am using angular-translate to provide i18n.
But I am struggling a little bit with how the URL structure should be. I do no plan on using either gTLDs nor ccTLDs, so that leaves me with three options.
Use query params: ?locale=en-us
Use url paths: /en-us/page
Store the chosen locale in localStorage or a cookie
The first option is a no-go according to Google's guidelines for web apps SEO. So that leaves me with the last two options.
I have a hard time deciding which is more beneficial, though I am inclined to believe that using url paths would probably be more crawler friendly.
P.S: Not sure if this is the best place to ask such a question either.
The second option is your safest bet as according to https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/59652/what-happens-if-i-try-to-set-a-cookie-on-a-bot cookies are ignored. You can test this yourself by going to the Google Console and fetching your website.
As of now most crawlers ignore cookies and DO NOT execute JavaScript. This means that they usually just download the html and make their judgements from there.
Some developers get around the no javascript problem by pre-rendering parts of their content. I haven't done it personally but you might want to check out https://prerender.io/
Edit
As rolandjitsu mentioned google crawls and executes javascript content.
You should go with second option: provide the language tag (and, optionally, region subtags) in the URL path as first segment.
For the simple reason that it allows you, visitors, and bots to link to specific translations.

Canonical url and localization

In my application I have localized urls that look something like this:
http://examle.com/en/animals/elephant
http://examle.com/nl/dieren/olifant
http://examle.com/de/tiere/elefant
This question is mainly for Facebook Likes, but I guess I will hit similar problems when I start thinking about search engine crawlers.
What kind of url would you expect as canonical url? I don't want to use the exact english url, because I want that people clicking the link will be forwarded to their own language (browser setting/dependent on IP).
The IP lookup is not something that I want to do on every page hit. Besides that I would need to incorporate more 'state' in my application, because I have to check wether a user has already been forwarded to his own locale, or is browsing the english version on purpose.
I guess it will going to be something like:
http://example.com/something/animals/elephant
or maybe without any language identifier at all:
http://example.com/animals/elephant
but that is a bit harder to implement, bigger chance on url clashes in the future (in the rare case I would get a category called en or de).
Summary
What kind of url would you expect as canonical url? Is there already a standard set for this?
I know this question is a bit old, but I was facing the same issue.
I found this:
Different language versions of a single page are considered duplicates only if the main content is in the same language (that is, if only the header, footer, and other non-critical text is translated, but the body remains the same, then the pages are considered to be duplicates).
That can be found here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls
From this I can conclude that we should add locales to canonicals.
I did find one resource that recommends not using the canonical tag with localized addresses. However, Google's documentation does not specify and only mentions subdomains in another context.
There is more that that language that you need to think of.
It's typical a tuple of 3 {region, language, property}
If you only have one website then you have {region, language} only.
Every piece of content can either be different in this 3 dimensional space, or at least presented differently. But this is the same piece of content so you'd like to centralize managing of editorial signals, promotions, tracking etc etc. Think about search systems - you'd like page rank to be merged across all instances of the article, not spread thinly out.
I think there is a standard solution: Canonical URL
Put language/region into the domain name
example.com
uk.example.com
fr.example.com
Now you have a choice how you attach a cookie for subdomain (for language/region) or for domain (for user tracking)!
On every html page add a link to canonical URL
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/awesome-article.html" />
Now you are done.
There certainly is no "Standard" beyond it has to be an URL. What you certainly do see on many comercial websites is exactly what you describe:
<protocol>://<server>/<language>/<more-path>
For the "language-tag" you may follow RFCs as well. I guess your 2-letter-abbrev is quite fine.
I only disagree on the <more-path> of the URL. If I understand you right you are thinking about transforming each page into a local-language URL? I would not do that. Maybe I am not the standard user, but I personally like to manually monkey around in URLs, i.e. if the URL shown is http://examle.com/de/tiere/elefant, but I don't trust the content to be translated well I would manually try http://examle.com/en/tiere/elefant -- and that would not bring me to the expected page. And since I also dislike those URLs http://ex.com/with-the-whole-title-in-the-url-so-the-page-will-be-keyworded-by-search-engines my favorite would be to just exchange the <language> part and use generic english (or any other language) for <more-path>. Eg:
http://examle.com/en/animals/elephant
http://examle.com/nl/animals/elephant
http://examle.com/de/animals/elephant
If your site is something like Wikipedia, then I would agree to your scheme of translating the <more-part> as well.
Maybe this Google's guidelines can help with your issue: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
It says that many websites serve users (across the world) with content targeted to users in a certain region. It is advised to use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in Search results.

Is there any disadvantage (in SEO terms) to using a country-specific subdomain over the country's TLD?

I'm developing a site at the moment which requires localization to a number of different countries. We own our site's name on many of the countries' TLDs (though not all of them). From a developer's perspective, many things are simplified if we could simply redirect all traffic to "domainname.co.uk" to "uk.domainnname.com" (or "domainname.fr" to "fr.domainname.com") — but my boss is concerned that there may be an adverse SEO impact from doing this.
So, I'm wondering if anyone knows if there is indeed any SEO impact from doing this. The country-specific content is still there, just served from a country-specific subdomain rather than the TLD.
Sorry if this is all a bit confusing! If anyone can offer any help, that would be fantastic.
Many thanks.
From the SEO point of view, it is always better to do domainname.com/fr Why? Because all the links to domainname.com/uk and domainname.com/fr are added to the same PageRank. If you have individual domains, the links are diluted between domains.
What Richie says is not right, because you can tell Google the specific geo target using Google WebMasters Tools
Here is an example, searching only sites "from argentina" (.ar TLD) where the top result is a generic .com
alt text http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/8862/capturejl.png
A country-specific search engine like google.co.uk will understand that domainname.co.uk is a UK site, but it won't understand that about uk.domainnname.com.
If I select google.co.uk's pages from the UK option I'd expect to see the former but not the latter.
(Edit: Yes, you can configure this for Google and some other search engines, but there's more to SEO than one or two specific search engines.)

Url format for internationalized web app?

Scenario
The web server gets a request for http://domain.com/folder/page. The Accept-Language header tells us the user prefers Greek, with the language code el. That's good, since we have a Greek version of page.
Now we could do one of the following with the URL:
Return a Greek version keeping the current URL: http://domain.com/folder/page
Redirect to http://domain.com/folder/page/el
Redirect to http://domain.com/el/folder/page
Redirect to http://el.domain.com/folder/page
Redirect to http://domain.com/folder/page?hl=el
...other alternatives?
Which one is best? Pros, cons from a user perspective? developer perspective?
I would not go for option 1, if your pages are publically available, i.e. you are not required to log in to view the pages.
The reason is that a search engine will not scan the different language versions of the page.
The same reason goes agains option no 5. A search engine is less likely to identify two pages as separate pages, if the language identification goes in the query string.
Lets look at option 4, placing the language in the host name. I would use that option if the different language versions of the site contains completely different content. On a site like Wikipedia for example, the Greek version contains its own complete set of articles, and the English version contains another set of articles.
So if you don't have completely different content (which it doesn't seem like from your post), you are left with option 2 or 3. I don't know if there are any compelling arguments for one over the other, but no. 3 looks nicer in my eyes. So that is what I would use.
But just a comment for inspiration. I'm currently working on a web application that has 3 major parts, one public, and two parts for two different user types. I have chosen the following url scheme (with en referring to language of course):
http://www.example.com/en/x/y/z for the public part.
http://www.example.com/part1/en/x/y/z for the one private part
http://www.example.com/part2/en/x/y/z for the other private part.
The reason for this is that if I were to split the three parts up into separate applications, it will be a simple reconfiguration in the web server when I have the name of the part at the top of the path. E.g. if we were to use a commercial CMS system for the public part of the site
Edit:
Another argument against option no. 1 is that if you ONLY listen to accept-language, you are not giving the user a choice. The user may not know how to change the language set up in a browser, or may be using a frinds computer setup to a different language. You should at least give the user a choice (storing it in a cookie or the user's profile)
I'd choose number 3, redirect to http://example.com/el/folder/page, because:
Language selection is more important than a page selection, thus selected language should go first in a true human-readable URL.
Only one domain gets all Google's PR. That's good for SEO.
You could advert your site locally with a language code built-in. E.g. in Greece you would advert as http://example.com/el/, so every local visitor will get to a site in Greece and would avoid language-choosing frustration.
Alternatively, you can go for number 5: it is fine for Google and friends, but not as nice for a user.
Also, we should refrain to redirect a user anywhere, unless required. Thus, in my mind, a user opening http://example.com/folder/page should get not a redirect, but a page in a default language.
Number four is the best option, because it specifies the language code pretty early. If you are going to provide any redirects always be sure to use a canonical link tag.
Pick option 5, and I don't believe it is bad for SEO.
This option is good because it shows that the content for say:
http://domain.com/about/corporate/locations is the same as the content in
http://domain.com/about/corporate/locations?hl=el except that the language differs.
The hl parameter should override the Accept-language header so that the user can easily control the matter. The header would only be used when the hl parameter is missing. Granted linking is a little complicated by this, and should probably be addressed through either a cookie which would keep the redirection going to the language chosen by the hl parameter (as it may have been changed by the user from the Accept-language setting, or by having all the links on the page be processed for adding on the current hl parameter.
The SEO issues can be addressed by creating index files for everything like stackoverflow does, these could include multiple sets of indices for the different languages, hopefully encouraging showing up in results for the non-default language.
The use of 1 takes away the differentiator in the URL. The use of 2 and 3 suggest that the page is different, possibly beyond just language, like wikipedia is. And the use of 4 suggests that the server itself is separated, perhaps even geographically.
Because there is a surprisingly poor correlation of geographic location to language preferences, the issue of providing geographically close servers should be left to a proper CDN setup.
My own choice is #3: http://domain.com/el/folder/page. It seems to be the most popular out there on the web. All the other alternatives have problems:
http://domain.com/folder/page --- Bad for SEO?
http://domain.com/folder/page/el --- Doesn't work for pages with parameters. This looks weird: ...page?par1=x&par2=y/el
http://domain.com/el/folder/page --- Looks good!
http://el.domain.com/folder/page --- More work needed to deploy since it requires adding subdomains.
http://domain.com/folder/page?hl=el --- Bad for SEO?
It depends. I would choose number four personally, but many successful companies have different ways of achieving this.
Wikipedia uses subdomains for various
languages (el.wikipedia.org).
So does Yahoo (es.yahoo.com for Spanish), although it doesn't support Greek.
So does Gravatar (el.gravatar.com)
Google uses a /intl/el/ directory.
Apple uses a /gr/ directory (albeit in English and limited to an iPhone page)
It's really up to you. What do you think your customers will like the most?
None of them. A 'normal user' wouldn't understand (and so remember) any of those abbreviations.
In order of preference I'd suggest:
http://www.domain.gr/folder/page
http://www.domain.com/
http://domain.com/gr/folder/page
3 or 4.
3: Can be easily dealt with using htaccess/mod_rewrite. The only downside is that you'd have to write some method of automatically injecting the language code as the first segment of the URI.
4: Probably the best method. Using host headers, it can all be sent to the same web application/content but you can then use code to extract the language code and go from there.
Simples. ;)
I prefer 3 or 4

Best way to format pretty URLs for numeric IDs

Alright, so let's say I'm writing a forum application, and I want pretty URLs. However, all my tables use numeric IDs, so I'm not sure the best way to format the URLs for those resources. Let's pretend I'm trying to get a topic with ID 123456 and title This is a forum post. I've seen it done a couple ways:
www.example.com/topic/123456
www.example.com/topic/this-is-a-forum-post
www.example.com/topic/123456/this-is-a-forum-post
Which one would you say is, taking all things into consideration (including SEO), the optimal URL?
Sorry if this question is too vague, but it seems programming-related and it's not incredibly open-ended, as I just want to hear the pros and cons of each method.
I would go with option 3, and make the slug (the last bit) optional
Because?
The ID will always be unique... 2 people may make a thread with the name 'good news' for example
The search bots can access the slug for some SEO goodness
The slug should be optional ... Using just the ID should still give you access to the site. Perhaps if the slug isn't there you could forward to the slug'd version, if you're concerned about duplicate content. You could always use the canonical meta tag to tell Google to index the slugged version.
Another benefit of the optional slug is if someone copies and pastes the URL into a document, there is a chance it could have characters at the end chopped off (because URLs generally don't have spaces, so they don't break to new lines). Having the slug optional means there is more of a chance people will find your page.
I believe this is what Stack Overflow does.. and also notice they are doing rather well in the Search Engines.
Update
From the comments, be sure to 301 redirect any missing slug version to the correct slug.
URL 1 is definitely suboptimal. URL 2 is attractive but you run the risk of confusion if tags collide, especially if they differ only in punctuation. So I'd say URL 3 is the clear winner.
Also note that just because you display URL 3 is no reason not to accept all 3, with the other two redirecting. If URL 2 is ambiguous, it should redirect to a disambiguation page.
I would think that the 2nd URL would be the best for SEO since it is meaningful and has less depth. It's nicer for people as well since you can look at the URL and know what the content is about.
Doesn't include the title, so you'll lose the additional SEO value of having those keywords in the URL.
Won't work well, because it doesn't have a unique numerical ID, so what are you going to do if someone else tries to post a topic titled "This is a forum post"? Then you start getting into the weird thing digg does, where it has to give the second one the url "http://www.example.com/topic/this-is-a-forum-post_2", and so on. It makes it harder to take the URL they tried to load, and figure out exactly which topic they were trying to get to.
Has the best of both worlds, this would be my style of choice.
Stackoverflow seems to using pattern 3, with the title being ignored completely (just the id is used).
That makes for nice semantic URL, and is also easy to implement, and still works if the title changes later.
Of course, the title could be completely fake:
Best way to format pretty URLs for numeric IDs
I'll go for the first one. You know it really doesn't matter now. Since there are Long URLs converter and it will just proliferate and will become the norm in the future. Remember the longer your URL the less SEO points you'll get.
And you can't control the way people name their forum topics. So really, I'll just choose the first one for simplicity and the norm.
For SEO/traffic, definitely no.2 without a doubt. Get those meaningless numbers out of the URL every single time.
www.example.com/topic/this-is-a-forum-post
pickup the "this-is-a-forum-post" from your database and map it back to the ID number within your database via a query. Then do an internal URL re-write to the real page, something like /topic.php?ID=324342
I would go with option 2, as SEO can better understand.
Stack Overflow uses the third way, probably, that is the reason, Stack Overflow urls were not optimized for SEO. I am not sure in the above answer.
But In my experience with Google, Quite Often, I could see a solution from other forums, whereas stackoverflow solutions were almost invisible.
Best way to format pretty URLs for numeric IDs
Best way to format pretty URLs for numeric IDs
if the both urls were one and the same, the SEO simply goes with option 2, which is less optimized.
I'm not convinced longer URL's are SEO trouble. The depth seems to be a bigger issue, and not by counting slashes, but by steps it takes to get from an indexed page with rank to the content page. I recently created a dummy test page titled /content/roofing/how-much-does-a-shingle-roof-cost.html and threw it on the server just to test pathways and make sure my directories were working correctly. I'm not even sure how google discovered the page but it did and it started getting traffic, so I had to give it content and make it part of the family. The dummy content was a copy of our about page so it wasn't empty, but I was surprised an unpromoted page would get traction, and think the URL had something to do with that.
Which brings up a slight alternative to the above 3 choices for a URL. What if you went with number 3 but added .html to the end? I generally do this with dynamic URL's but I have no concrete evidence that it's helpful. According to Google they brag that they can index dynamic URL's just fine and so there's no need to do URL rewrites at all. Google doesn't mind a bit if the other engines aren't as good at that. Several sites I trust add the html at the end (blogger for example) and it can't hurt, so I still do it.
i would suggest the first one, since the topic title can be changed for clarity, by the admins and then the url will be inconsistent.
www.example.com/topic/123456
also allows one to just edit the last bit of the url (the numbers and jump to another topic), not likely to happen but still a usable feature.

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