: Removing page levels/ keeping url clean I have recently put my site live - http://www.soundplaza.co.uk I then bumped into a few articles mentioning about page length and depth and I was wondering
I have recently put my site live - www.soundplaza.co.uk
I then bumped into a few articles mentioning about page length and depth and I was wondering if I should change the URL structure while the site is new.
Change From:
www.soundplaza.co.uk/speakers/tannoy-revolution-signature-dc4t/10
Change To:
www.soundplaza.co.uk/speakers/tannoy-revolution-signature-dc4t-10
As you can probably see I am using the ID at the end to bring the page content through.
Do you think its worth removing the extra level, or do you think it will confuse the product name?
More posts by @Angie530
4 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
Page depth has less to do with site hierarchy, and more to do with how many clicks it takes the user to get to their desired destination. If it takes 1 click to go from yoursite.com to yoursite.com/this/that/everything/else/ then technically that's only 1 page deep.
I wouldn't tinker with the small stuff like this, as it will likely return little if any noticeable results (I'm leaning towards no results at all). Focusing your efforts elsewhere will have a much much higher ROI.
If you're up for suggestions, maybe try developing your brand identity a bit. The favicon looks pretty cool. Potentially a new logo incorporating it? If you want to improve your SEO/exposure, add a blog, reviews, or some function/feature that lets you add content relating to your products. Content is what differentiates you from everyone else in the eyes of the search engines, so spend your time where it counts!
I would remove the final /10 altogether if the model # is dc4t (what's the 10 for anyway? if it's like a parameter you use, I'd rather use a ?whatever=10)
It looks like your current URL paths are of the form /category/redundant-descriptive-title/id, where only the category and id parts are actually needed to identify the content. (For example, I can link to www.soundplaza.co.uk/speakers/blah-blah-who-reads-this-anyway/10 and see the exact same content as on the page you linked in your question.)
I would suggest changing that structure to /category/id/redundant-descriptive-title, so that the descriptive part of the URL is the last one. (If that looks familiar to you, it's the exact same URL structure as used by the StackExchange software.)
That order has a natural hierarchical structure: the first part identifies the category, the second identifies the product in the category, and the third... doesn't actually identify anything in this case, since it's redundant to the first two, but conceptually it could narrow down the identification even further.
I would also strongly suggest setting up either 301 redirects or rel=canonical links from URLs with incorrect (and/or outdated) descriptive parts to the correct canonical URLs for each product. If you don't do that, any links with outdated or mistyped or just plain bogus titles, like the one I demonstrated above, may be seen by search engines as duplicate content.
(Ps. Swapping the order of the URL path elements around like that might make dealing with legacy links a bit tricky, but I'd really consider that an excellent reason to do it ASAP rather than later. As long as none of your existing URLs have all-numeric middle parts, something like the following rewrite rule ought to redirect them to the new format:
RewriteRule ^/?([^/]+)/([0-9]*[^/0-9][^/]*)/([0-9]+)$ /// [NS,L,R=301]
Of course, you may want to adjust that regexp — especially the category part — to match your existing URLs structure more strictly.)
Edit: Per comments below, I might set up the rewrite rules something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# 301 redirect from speakers/title/id to speakers/id/title
RewriteRule ^speakers/([0-9]*[^/0-9][^/]*)/([0-9]+)$ /speakers// [NS,L,R=301]
# Internally rewrite speakers/id/title to details.php
RewriteRule ^speakers/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ details.php?dealID=&name= [NS]
I left out the [L] from the second rule, since it probably doesn't do what you expect when used with internal rewrites in an .htaccess file. If you really want to skip all later rewrite rules, use [END] instead.
As noted above, I would also recommend making details.php either:
include a rel=canonical link pointing to the correct www.soundplaza.co.uk/speakers/id/title URL for the item in the HTML <head> section, and/or
compare the title passed in via the name parameter to the title the product is supposed to have, and, if they don't match, return a 301 redirect to the correct canonical URL.
In fact, I'd suggest doing both: there are various corner cases that each of these techniques will handle that the other might not.
Terms of Use Create Support ticket Your support tickets Stock Market News! © vmapp.org2024 All Rights reserved.