Starting a Blog and URL Structure Advice

[All-Star-Vacation-Homes]

Hello SEOmoz Community,

We are going to start a blog on our website and have a slight dilemma.  Our site is a .Net site and the blog platform we've chosen (BlogEngine) only allows us to use the following url structure: www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name.  We've looked at other .Net blog software and this one meets all of our needs except for the ideal URL Structure.

We would like to remove the /post/ directory; however have not technically found a way to do it.  We wanted to get some opinions on whether or not we should just start with this URL structure and not worry about the extra directory, or work to find another solution that eliminates this extra directory.  Ideally we want to keep the posts as close to the root as possible for link juice distribution, and the extra directory could get in the way.

Also, if anyone has any advice on a more flexible .Net blog platform, suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

We thank you so much in advance for your time and help.

[EGOL]

I don't know the answer to this... just askin' in case a smart person knows.

Would there be any problem with using .htacess to get rid of the unwanted directory name... for example just 301 redirect everything from www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name to www.domain.com/post/post-name ?

I think that this would work since all of the action is on the server.

[Mike.Goracke]

Have you looked into URL rewriting?

Jen did a great post on this here.

It more or less allows you to rewrite the URL however you want.

So instead of www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name you could do www.domain.com/blog/article/post-name or www.domain.com/blog/post-name or even www.domain.com/blog-post-name

Depending on your webserver, you should be able to accomplish this in a few lines of code.

Mike

[EGOL]

Thanks Mike.  That answers my question above.  There is a way to trick the server.

[All-Star-Vacation-Homes]

Thanks so much for the resource and feedback Mike...I have not looked into URL rewriting.  I'll forward this on to our developer.

With the URL rewrites and 301 redirects, I wonder if there are any long-term negative implications for SEO as we will be building a large library of posts.  Would it be better to leave /post/ in place without the URL rewrites and 301's?  Trying to weigh the positives and negatives of one over the other.

This is a nice solution to our dilemma and we thank you

[Mike.Goracke]

If you have not implemented the blog yet, you will not have to use 301 redirects. You only need to 301 if you have existing content, then want to point it to the newer URL.

Here is a real-case scenario:

We had an old URL

domain.com/content.asp?ID=9XXX123M85&AID=KXXX123JSL

We used URL rewriting to change that to domain.com/product - this tells the server to fetch the information from the ugly URL and display it using the new friendly URL. We then had to set up a 301 from the ugly URL to the new URL, ONLY BECAUSE the ugly URL was already in place and receiving inbound links from other sites.

At this same time, we also created a new page

domain.com/content.asp?ID=9XXX123M85&AID=XXXNEWPAGE

We used URL rewriting to change that to domain.com/solutions/feature - again, this tells the server to fetch the content from the ugly URL and display it using the friendly URL. This time, we did not need to set up a 301, because this was a brand new page.

From my research and understanding, there are no negative repercussions in using URL rewriting on new pages; however, if you use URL rewriting, you SHOULD also incorporate a 301 to redirect inbound links that were previously pointing to the old content.

Good luck Rich.

Mike

[All-Star-Vacation-Homes]

Perfect...Thanks for all the help and feedback Mike!

[Mike.Goracke]

Yeah, it is awesome for really dynamic URLs and pretty cool how you can completely make up directory structure to match your navigation or help with usability.