Directory site with an URL structure dilemma

[Dilbak]

Hello,

We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp).

Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages.

While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’.

One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest.

I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant.

My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them.

My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content.

With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts.

This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely.

Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way?

Many thanks,

Andras

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, when the question starts it sounds real easy to me but down the question it become too complex that it makes me confused on how to answer...

For Business listing I think it’s best to go with http://www.example.com/biz/my-business-name

For category pages the URL should be like http://www.example.com/oh/car-parts (oh represents the city name while car parts in the category)

All categories should come in all states for example if a person in California looks for car parts the url should be http://www.example.com/ca/car-parts

Reason why you should adopt this structure...

1. Duplicate content issue will be eliminated
2. URLs will not be so long so there will be no indexing issues
3. Even if a business selects the multiple categories the content will not be duplicated.

Hope this helps...

[Dilbak]

Thank you for your reply.

Your suggestion matches the actual way of how we handle the issue right now.

I have thought, that we might be able to improve the process a bit, but I am happy, that there is no need to change the way of how it works now.

[matbennett]

My guess would be that the bigger problem is not the URL structure, but the content on those category pages.  The change you propose to the URL structure is good in terms of helping the business listing pages and in creating a logical hierarchy, but it isn't going to help those category pages.

I'd start with looking at:

• Content of the category pages : Do they have unique content. Is that content useful in it's own terms?
• Internal linking of category pages : Are you linking back up to the categories from the businesses, are you linking down to them ok. Are those links close to the top of the site hierarchy?
• External links: Are you getting links from other websites to those pages (easier if they are useful)
• On page optimisation: Are the category pages themselves well optimised

I'd question whether there is any benefit at all to your category pages in changing the URL structure of your business pages.  However if there is some it's impact will pale to nothing compared to the above.

[Dilbak]

This post is deleted!

[matbennett]

Actually, I would say that uniqueness probably is an issue.  keep in mind that I don't speak Hungarian,but it looks like everything on that page is a snippet from the sub pages. ie none of the text on that page is unique to that page. Is that correct?

Adding unique content at category level, even just a few lines of natural text that include the main keywords can make quite a difference. I've found it much harder to rank category pages that do not have that.

That would probably be my first job. Even if you just did it on a sample set of pages and monitored those for any improvement.  Making them useful (and therefore attracting links) might be harder.

[Dilbak]

Your assumption is correct about the snippets.

We either use part of the business description or some of the actual review wording on the category pages.

While I understand the importance of your suggestion, that is all I have about these businesses, and I add these snippets to the lists, so that I could increase CTR through previews.

Yes, there is no original content, basically just 'copied contents' from several pages, so the category page is total duplicate to nothing, but not genuine either.

Thank you again for your help.

[matbennett]

It's painful, but that is your answer:

Q. Why isn't google ranking these pages better? 
A. Because they are not unique or useful

Google can be annoyingly smart like that.  The cheapest/easiest fix is probably to have a paragraph added to the top of each page.   So your /budapest/jatekbolt page would have a paragraph about the wonderful choice of restaurants available in budapest and it's rich culinary heritage. (queue affordably copywriter to help keep them different).

You could also consider adding a field to your business database for "recommended snippet" which if filled in highlights that listing and gives a more in depth amount of information. You could the have someone look at reviews for the listings in key categories, pick our favourites and write a fresh description to those featured businesses.

The result of that will be a page that has more unique content and is in fact slightly more useful, That puts you in good standing for improved rankings.

[Dilbak]

Ok, this is something I can take as homework.

Thank you for having checked my issue in details.

[matbennett]

You're welcome.  As you might have guessed, I've tackled this problem myself a few times!!