URL, Breadcrumb/Site Hierarchy Display, User (and Bot) Expectations

[netzkern_AG]

TL;DR: Do parts of URLs that are used throughout the web quite consistently have any influence on robots (or users)? Are there any studies? What would you use for pages that are something between a tag-page and a wiki-like article?

Long version:

On a site with a lot of content, I decided to go for tags to present articles on that topic together. My first thought was to simply list those under the URL /tag/{Tag_Name}. Short. Simple. Grabs the core meaning - on this page you'll find stuff about the tag.

But: those tag-pages will be more than just lists of the tagged pages (let's say they are articles on various topics and products with certain attributes and the same tag can apply to a product and an article). The tag pages themselves will often talk a lot about the use of said tag - extensively, without blabbering. It is aimed at being a landing page and hub for the tag/keyword. Having this in mind, I pondered using /wiki/. It does fit in some respects, but it really is not a wiki.  /info/, /lexicon/, /knowledge/ and other ideas came to mind but the more I thought the weirder I did find most ideas.

What I am now wondering:

1. Do these parts of URLs (/tag/, or /product/, or /wiki/) that are not really keywords in most cases have any influence on search engines? They are used quite consistently across the web and therefore could be used as signals. I suspect, though, that they might have more influence on shaping user expectation. (If I see /wiki/ in an URL or site hierarchy display (breadcrumb), I expect ... well, a wiki-style page; if I see /tag/ I expect a collection of stuff with that tag.)

2. What would you chose if it is not quite a tag, nor quite a wiki but something in-between? Or do you think it does not matter at all? (Breadcrumbs will be used and google has used them for display in just about all SERPs.)

3. Are there perchance any studies concerning these parts of URLS?

Regards

Nico

[CleverPhD]

I am not aware of any studies showing impact of what you call "not really keywords".  Even if there were, I would ignore them as you have to ask, "Do these words mean anything to your users?"  I work in some verticals where when you use a term like "wiki" or "faq" people think I am either talking about some type of weaved basket or I just said they were overweight, respectively.  I think it is good to start from a common lexicon, with words like "wiki" etc, but you still have to ask that initial question.

We went through this exercise about 2 years ago on a site as we wanted to setup an evergreen section for the top 40 keyword concepts.  Each concept would have a single page that would contain an original article that was at least 1,000 words long, custom videos, images, etc.

We asked a similar question.  Should we call the section (and folder in the URL) "wiki", or "encyclopedia" or "info", etc?  We did not want to call it a "wiki" as we had experts editing and writing and it was not open to the public to edit, even though for the sake of organization and layout, it looked like a wiki and provided information like one.  This is when we found out that our users were generally not as familiar with wikis and the comment with the weaved basket came out.

We did some keyword research and found that the word "help" made sense to users and also with the way Google looked at our topics when you used help in conjunction with the key terms we were trying to rank for. So we ended up using a URL that was domain.com/help/keyword-topic-of-article-slug.html  It has worked pretty well for us and the traffic has followed. We have our daily blog content and ecommerce sections in separate folder.  Makes it easy with GA and Search Console as we can look at each section easily and determine what is going on.  This was key when we had some issues with organic traffic as once we noticed overall traffic changes, we drilled down into the sections, found the issues and fixed.

TL;DR - Find out what words make sense to your users and use those, ideally they would also be keywords that you are trying to rank for. After than, just follow best practices for URL guidelines.

[netzkern_AG]

Thanks for your thoughts! That surely is some stuff worth thinking about - and reminding me that many people are a lot less familiar with online vocabulary than us her.

In the current case it does not really solve the problem due to it being a bit of a mixture of things like /motifs/ /themes/ /objects/ /characters/ /topoi/ etc. as they appear in a certain kind of literature.... but I really do not want to use multiple URLs for that. I might end up settling for /info/ as catch-all - and give it a more meaningful breadcrumb probably.

Regards

Nico