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That's really strange. Could you please share the screenshot when you're trying to fetch it as google in the GWT?

I have the same doubt, when I search for "askme" which is the company I work for, its showing the wrong wiki page link which talks about a female trio from Chicago Illinois (PFA the screenshot).

How can I tell google to not link that wiki page with our brand?

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Nice answer Jane. This probably answered many questions (that I had in my mind before reading your answer) related to the best URL I can have for my website. Cheers!

I'm working on URL structure for the same business model. Loved your answer Jane

While thinking about the ideal URL structure, I did consider some of the blogs (including this one by Rand: https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls, check point #11. Attaching a screenshot as well) and websites which were doing really good with their one level static URLs.

I actually did some keyword research on user's search pattern and google suggest data. Generally, our target search term comes before ("pizza huts" in this case) the geo location, may be people search things in a different way in India. Hence, I thought of keeping the URL structure that way.

A little confused about this point though "URL, breadcrumb both should match the sequence.  If one has one sequence, and the other has a different sequence, that confuses search algorithms". Because, have seen many website doing tremendously well who're not following these principles.

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Thank you so much once again Sir Alan.

Well, I'm just thinking aloud here. How about putting my primary keyword in the first level instead of having this well structured URL syntax? For instance:

• www.askme.com/pizza-huts-in-saket-delhi instead of www.askme.com/dehli/saket/pizza/pizza-hut/

Here,

• The complete primary keyword (or target search string) is closer to the domain. "Closer your keywords to the domain, better it is", I heard this somewhere. Is it still true and adds any additional value?
• We don't have deep URL directory structure and our primary keyword is together too. In the well structure URL (the one you suggested), the target keyword is broken into multiple pieces & the URL directories.
• But, I'm not exposing the hierarchy/navigation-flow via URL. I hope that's okay as far as I'm handling it cleanly from the breadcrumbs and rich snippets. What's your take on this?

I know there are chances of URL conflicts. For instance, if we have an area "foo" in the city "bar" vs a city "foo bar". I'll end up having the same URL for both the cases i.e /<search-query>-in-foo-bar. There are many such edge cases, I'm on it.</search-query>

Hi Mozzers,

I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets.

Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers.

Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.

Thank you so much Sir Alan. I really appreciate your efforts for compiling this detailed response to my questions. Have noted down all the points along with how better I can handle them, will soon come up with a better fat footer.

I have a very meta level question. Well, I was working on dynamic footer for the website: http://www.askme.com/, you can check the same in the footer. Now, if you refresh this page and check the content, you'll be able to see a different combination of the links in every section. I'm calling it a dynamic footer here, as the values are absolutely dynamic in this case.

**Why are we doing this? **For every section in the footer, we have X number of links, but we can show only 25 links in each section. Here, the value of X can be greater than 25 as well (let's say X=50). So, I'm randomizing the list of entries I have for a section and then picking 25 elements from it i.e random 25 elements from the list of entries every time you're refreshing the page.

Benefits from SEO perspective? This will help me exposing all the URLs to bots (in multiple crawls) and will add page freshness element as well.

**What's the problem, if it is? **I'm wondering how bots will treat this as, at any time bot might see us showing different content to bots and something else to users. Will bot consider this as cloaking (a black hat technique)? Or, bots won't consider it as a black hat technique as I'm refreshing the data every single time, even if its bot who's hitting me consecutively twice to understand what I'm doing.