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A quick Wordpress Permalink checkup...

I'm generally a fan of %postname% Permalink structure in Wordpress - although this does create a completely flat architecture, so that ALL Pages AND Posts are found at www.domain.com/_________

I'm sure I've heard, read, or ingested somewhere that it makes more sense to use /blog/%postname% which then makes all Blog Posts reside at www.domain.com/blog/________ with the static Page content still being at www.domain.com/________

Any thoughts to why this would NOT be a good idea?

To me this seems more logical.. and like I say I'm sure I've heard an authority say Google kind of prefers that it can differentiate Blog content from everything else. I've used this successfully on a few sites so far, and all seems to be good. (Moz although not Wordpress, uses this structure for it's blog).

Thanks!

haha good to see Roger on his travels, but he has work to do lol! As Keri said he's here: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Thanks Keri!

Could someone please tell me where Rogerbot lives now?!

Unless I'm having distorted memories, I used to be able to crawl websites with Rogerbot (that are not set-up as Campaigns). Could someone please let me know where to find this now?

p.s. I didn't really want to Q&A this, but after a while clicking around moz I'm now even questioning myself!

Thanks Tom,

Oh that's your Amazon store too, good stuff then!

Haha the niche isn't 'cats in bomber jackets', but may as well be lol! As the niche has many EMD's and matching product URL's I'm paying close attention to the competition in the SERP's. Although, as with many things, testing is probably the best way to find out. I'll see how it goes, with the current structure and if I can only get so far maybe try the 'flatter' approach.

thanks again,

Greg

Hi Tom, thanks very much for your answer and posting your store links.. actually you're not a million miles away from my Essex home.. small world huh!

Yes I certainly am a fan of the breadcrumb drilling down and organising by category, and only started thinking differently after watching an old WBF with Rand talking about flat architecture http://vimeo.com/3873783 , (and I think there may have been another with Dr. Pete too). Then I started looking at the big UK stores like M&S, John Lewis, etc. and saw that they use the flat architecture - with individual products directly after the domain name, despite being many categories down: eg. http://www.johnlewis.com/reiss-rathjen-passport-holder/p231880395?colour=Khaki (which ranks #1 for "reiss rathjen passport holder").

It's very interesting to see the URL structure on your site, which is really well organised.. and I like the idea of the short URL by cat no. which must be is handy for customers. Yet I guess you're not trying to actively rank for 'product numbers', and if someone searches for the 'product name' you can "sometimes" be outranked by the competitor's use in URL: e.g. search for "Proel Rubber Microphone Holder 22mm - 26mm" and amazon wins. However for most you win so kudos to you!

Seeing as the site I'm working on only has a few products in a specific niche, maybe I'm over-thinking it.. however it's in a niche with many competing Exact Match Domain's and keyword-matched URL's, so that's why I'm giving it extra thought.

thanks again for your answer. I'll bookmark your site for my next audio needs too

not many... about twenty.

Hey Mozzers,

I'm optimizing a small ecommerce site. The site URL directory structure seems all good & logical, BUT should I try for a flatter architecture - so that the individual products are at top level after the domain name in URLs?

e.g.
www.domain.com/first-item/
www.domain.com/second-item/
etc. etc.

My current setup (I'm using the Woocommerce plugin in Wordpress):

www.domain.com/shop/ (main shop page)
www.domain.com/shop/category-name-1/
www.domain.com/shop/category-name-2/
www.domain.com/shop/category-name-3/

with products appearing as:
www.domain.com/product/first-item/
www.domain.com/product/second-item/
etc.

I've researched some big brand ecommerce sites and most seem to be domain.com/amazing-product/ even if the product itself is many categories or sub-categories down. i.e. Homepage > Home & Furniture > Furniture > Living Room Furniture > Coffee Tables

As I say the information architecture makes sense from a user point of view, but I'm guessing the individual products would stand more chance of ranking if directly following the domain name? Woocommerce although flexible doesn't seem to do this out-of-the-box, so please some advice before I go on a hacking and URL rewriting mission!

Thanks

Interesting stats there Kyle. thanks!

Thanks very much for your explanation Paul. Makes total sense! Good to know this is quite common and no harm will come of it.

For this initial test I will add the no-index and keep it in silo, which will also make measurements more precise - not mixing traffic.

your P.S. is exactly why I'm proposing to treat the page as a separate entity (at least for now). I see it as a high conversion page for visitors to do one thing - click Buy, and not to start browsing around the rest of the site.

thanks again for your reply.

Greg

thanks Irving for your response.

The page is just a test for the moment, so that's the reason I'm cautious to put it on the main domain & feature in the navigation, etc.

I'm aware of how PPC can help with organic SEO in a more standard setting with the page featured as usual, and yes it would certainly be nice to get some added PR as side-effect.

I'm all for any benefit that may trickle through as a side-effect, but it's not a primary concern, unless of course it does harm.

I have an e-commerce site with a small product line which an on-going organic SEO campaign.

As a side project, I'm planning on doing some PPC testing with a highly converting product squeeze page, which I'll run Google ads to gain traffic. (this is PPC only and for this page I am not concerned with organic SEO traffic - although of course the page itself will be fully optimized).

I am wondering whether to run this squeeze page on a sub-domain or sub-directory of the existing site, OR to host it on a completely fresh domain?

I would like to know if as side-effect my existing Website benefit 'organically' from some of the PPC traffic, helping with it's domain authority, etc.,? or could this possibly do any harm?

p.s. Bear in mind this is not going to be a page visible on the on the main site itself, it's a separate entity for PPC.

Would be great to have some expert Moz eyes on this and opinions. Thanks!

Thanks for your reply Marcus, and also for the details for moving to root. That may come in handy, and anyone else who stumbles across this thread too.

It's good to know there appear to be no issues for SEO in Wordpress residing in a subdirectory, yet I am appreciating more and more the need to keep things as simple and straight forward as possible.

Greg

Hi, I've used this method a few times of developing Wordpress websites in a subdirectory and only moving the index.php file to root when the site is ready to launch. (full details of how this is done in the link below)

The sites I've used this on all index correctly and rank for their terms, so I haven't seen any negatives at all. However moving forward I would like to know for sure if this is indeed SEO-friendly?

note: The site functions as any other at www.domain.com, it's only the Wordpress install & admin etc. resides at: www.domain.com/wordpress/ -the pages are served to root ie. www.domain.com/about)

Details.. WordPress from a subdirectory to the root directory:

http://askwpgirl.com/how-do-i-move-wordpress-from-a-subdirectory-to-the-root-directory/

thanks in advance.

From what I understand, Exact match is for determining a keywords worth for the short term traffic for a keyword. Broad match gives an estimation of what is achievable over a longer period of time.

This video from Market Samurai explains this:

http://www.noblesamurai.com/dojo/marketsamurai/7932-understanding-match-type-data

I haven't tried Market Samurai yet. I currently just use Adwords keyword tool, then check Keyword difficulty in SEOMoz, but I'd like to streamline my process if possible, so I'll be interested to see what other people recommend.

Yea my concern is that the SERPs are looking a bit junky. I don't mind if Sitelinks aren't present, and there's one result listed, but the multiple results definitely look untidy. If it's a Google issue as spoke of in the SEO roundtable post then so be it.

I'm in the process of building out the internal pages, backlinks and domain authority, so hopefully that will help to earn the more elegant sitelinks. Thanks also for the clarification with the page titles.

yeah that's what I was referring to. Indeed there's not really any negative implications as such other than it looks a bit spammy / untidy. If it's out of my control then fair enough, thought I better check though.

Hi Kane,

thanks for your reply.

Yea its shows multiple times on a search for "company name" (position 1, 2 & 3)

I guess it doesn't look "bad" in the SERPs, just irregular, and not as elegant as Sitelinks (I momentarily forgot what they were called). Sitelinks show up for a number of other sites that I've made in Wordpress, but this site in question is straight old HTML. Not sure if that matters.

The SERPS look like the ones with the red arrows in this example when I was googling around for a solution. The post explains something about it: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-same-result-same-page-15287.html

My page titles and meta descriptions are unique, but are similar I guess. I have recently switched the Page titles to 'Keyword | Company name' format, when previously they were the other way around - so maybe that has something to do with it? Should I be using 'Company name | Keyword' for the homepage and the reverse for other pages?

I've been optimizing a small static HTML site and have been working to increase the keyword rankings, yet have always ranked #1 for the company name.

But, I've now noticed the company name is taking more than just the first position - the site is now appearing in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd position (each position referencing a different page of the site).

Great.. who doesn't want to dominate a page of Google! ..But it looks kind of untidy and not usually how links from the same site are displayed.

Is this normal? I'm used to seeing results from the same site grouped under the primary result, but not like this.

any info appreciated