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I am looking at our site structure, and don't want to have to rebuild the way the site was linked together based on it's current folder structure so I am wondering what option would work better for our URL structure.

I will uses car categories as an example of what I am talking about, but you can insert any category structure you like.

For example I would like to have pages like this:

www.example.com/ford-convertibles
www.example.com/chevy-convertibles

But instead due to the site structure I will need to have pages like this:

www.example.com/ford/convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/convertibles

But wonder if I shouldn't do the following to ensure the proper phrase is known for the page:

www.example.com/ford/ford-convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/chevy-convertibles

The "/ford/ford-convertibles" just seems odd to me as a human, but I haven't seen anything on how well a keyphrase in a URL split by /'s does and I know dashes for phrases are fine. This means I am inclined to go with the"/ford/ford-convertibles"style because it keeps the keyphrase separated by dashes even if it is a bit repetitive.

There will be other pages too like "/ford/top-10-fords-ever" but I don't wonder about that since it isnt "ford/ford-xxxxx"

Thoughts on whether /'s in a keyphrase are as good as dashes?

Check out articles on the Panda update recently to see a lot about this topic.

I especially like this one from Vanessa Fox

The gist of it is that Google has started to devalue sites with lots of "cloned" pages where the content is very similar from page to page, but the area info, or keyword swaps out.

This is based on the idea that content that is tailored to a page's topic is more useful to the user, and it is more likely to carry nuances than broader content.

So for example I can talk about hotels in Dallas, or New York the same exact way "See Dallas/New York Hotels downtown and be close to all of the hip restaurants and activities"

Or I could go with something more Dallas Specific "See our Downtown Dallas Hotels near the American Airlines center, the Dallas Museum of Art, and direct access to the DART Trains"

The second example is WAY more useful to the user, and so Google's latest updates will tend to favor that over generic topical text.

So if you can afford to get copywriting for each topic I would.

If you can't then I would start picking out the biggest value terms and build content specific to that, use generic content for the other terms for now, but slowly replace those over time as well with more valuable content.

You may be in a situation where there isn't more valuable specific content to outrank you right now so the generic content will do decently in the rankings. In this case you may not see such a horrible ranking, but when someone eventually competes with you and catches on to your scheme it will be better to have the unique content already working for you.

Just my 2 cents

One of my colleagues wrote a firefox extension for shortening URLs with Analytics Tracking Variables tacked on. When loaded up in firefox you can give it a URL, or have it grab the page URL for the page you are currently viewing. You can check it out here to see if it fits your needs:

http://www.tysonkirksey.com/snip-n-tag/

It has the following shortening options: bit.ly, goo.gl, Tiny URL, is.gd. cli.gs, and safe.mn

Not sure if that hits your main need, but thought  I would toss it out there as it can be useful.

Yeah I was going to the account, and trying to set the search location to India locations, but since it was .com it wasn't going to work.

I was trying to find a way to make it ignore my IP as well. Either way I still didn't see the site on the indian version of Google, when not logged in (e.g. no history to change my results).

If I am reading the google custom search notes correctly your URL would have google show me Indian sites, but our site is a .com in the US being clicked on by people in India, so I am not positive it would work for what I am looking at. I appreciate the help though

This is a guess, and I appreciate any input, but it seems like google is listing the "real estate" sites just as well as the realtor sites.

So I went over to google sets, did a quick check on "Colorado Realtor" and the only other related term that google notes should be part of the set is "real estate"

As someone else mentioned "Real Estate" shows to get more searches in adwords estimating as well. This makes me wonder if google's algorithm thinks the real estate terms are really what the user wants to see. So I ran the search for "Colorado Springs Realtors" with the quotes around it and that site dropped out of the top 10, and it only shows up with it's page that actual focuses on the term "Realtors".

So this seems less like it is about anchor text, and more about Google's algorithm trying to predict what will be more useful to the user. I am not sure how you would combat something like this other than to perhaps include more "real Estate" terms intermingled in your content with "realtor" terms, but that leads to diluting your focus too

Not sure this helps a ton, but figured I would put that observation out there.

I was recently checking out our analytics keywords stats and I am seeing traffic noted as google organic traffic coming from India.

When I do a search on http://www.google.co.in/ for those terms using a "incognito" browser with no cookies, and not logged in I don't see our site in the first 100 results.

The same thing happens on google.com if I try to set the account in india.

I am trying to see if this might be an issue with an adwords campaign not getting auto-tagged (auto-tagging is turned on in adwords), or if there is something else going on. The keyword campaign gets many more clicks than analytics shows for this organic option so perhaps it is an odd rare occurrence.

I am glad to have the traffic, but I want to be sure it is actually tracking correctly as organic, or if PPC is not tagging for some reason

Any suggestions or thoughts?

So my devs have the canonical URL loaded up on pages automatically, and in most cases this gets done correctly. However we ran across a bug that left some of these blank like so:

Does anyone know what effect that would have?

I am trying to provide a priority for this so I can say "FIX IT NOW" or "Fix it after the other 'FIX IT NOW' type of items".

Let me know if you have any ideas. I just want to be sure I am not telling google that all of these pages are like the home page.

Thanks!

Using the in the header of the page will tell most bots who care that the various versions of the page URL that bring up this content are really the page referenced in the canonical link tag.

This is very handy when you have index pages that show up for /, index, and /folderName. Since the same page is actually loaded for these the bot will see the canonical tag and should remember they are all the same (or just go to the page you tell it to).

This is usually the easiest solution (if you can automate it for most pages) as you may not catch all of your weird URL situations with one 301 redirect.

Hope that helps.

I linked up the reports to my analytics account, and wanted to double check the period it uses for that number.

When showing visits what time period is the report showing me? If I double check my stats in GA it looks like the past week but wanted to double check.

Thanks!

Usually Google and Bing do a good job of figuring out when terms are similar unless they have completely separate meanings (see Rand's response on singular vs plural). In your case if you go to google and type in "switchplate" it actually shows the "Did you mean switch plate?".

Also if you do a search on "Switch Plate" you notice Amazon comes up first with the word separated.

So those two notes are some big clues as to what direction to go for that example.

Either way I would use PPC as a playground here and run exact match ad campaigns for both versions of the term, find out which gets more traffic for you, which gets better conversions, and then optimize for that one first. Go with the data.

Anecdotaly I have heard singular is better for e-commerce as plural is usually used in language when talking about an item informationally. So I would probably go for singular and throw in a couple of plural versions on the page like an h2 or h3 link for "Other switch plates".

This could also be handled by doing your high level category pages as plural, and specific product pages as singular. I would probably keep a term like "switch plate" consistently separated in my copy though if I saw this was the big winner in my PPC test, but that is the copywriter/editor in me begging for consistency and not the SEO tweaker going for every version. In the end I still want my site to be user friendly and clean.

I would get those re-written to dashes for a few different reasons:

1. Dashes are known as the best way to separate terms in URLS
2. IMO dashes are easier to read by the user, and easier to remember thus more user friendly (just my opinion though no data behind this)
3. Plus signs are often used in URL encoding or in query strings, both of which are not great for users, and both of which have been thought of in the past to look somewhat "off putting" to search engines compared to dashes.

So while it might be a pain I would say go to dashes.