Thread: URLs and SEO

Our Internet marketing company has told us that the URLs on our site are problematic for SEO. They are specifically talking about the information that is at the beginning of the URL (eg. p80-, c22-, m12-, etc..).

Is there a way to turn off this functionality and leave only the SEName value?

I can assure you those url's are not problematic. One of my competitors uses ASPDNSF and has those urls and they are at the top of the rankings on almost all keywords. In all honesty, that was a big reason we are switching to ASPDNSF. We were around long before this competitor and they just came in and shot to the top of the rankings.

Our next build (Ashland Release) will allow you to change the urls if you really wanted to, but again, I concur, our SEO is among the best out there, we've never really had any negative feedback on the URL structure, and we're on page 1 of many SEO terms as well.

We have heard the "my competitor uses your platform and is killing us on SEO..." feedback a few times

Proper/full SEO also does require a lot of due diligence/hard work (setting up all page content, tags, titles, etc) as well as link building and other tasks. So a proper SEO firm is also recommended, and we use VerticalMeasures.com also ourselves, to help ensure we optimize all this stuff.

Our Internet marketing company has told us that the URLs on our site are problematic for SEO. They are specifically talking about the information that is at the beginning of the URL (eg. p80-, c22-, m12-, etc..).

I've discussed this with a lot of very good SEO folks, and the overwhelming consensus is that our URLs are absolutely fine for SEO purposes. If any, moving the entity/product id and code from the URL will have very minor impact. Beware that there are a lot of SEO snake oil salespersons out there. If they are blaming the platform for not achieving results, I would view the accusation with great suspicion and perhaps get a separate opinion.

The URLs would honestly be the last thing I would look at tweaking.

Maybe take a look at http://www.verticalmeasures.com

This is exactly what I needed...

Thanks to all who took the time to reply.

Hello,
I've read the above posts regarding the SEO friendliness of the URLs - I have a question however regarding the fact that when you have multiple locales the url for each page remains the same regardless of the locale. For example:

Canadian English Locale
url example www.mysite.com/c-1-productname

US English Locale
url example is the same as above.

I am hearing that this is bad for SEO and that the pages will not be indexed. Does anyone else know about this and have a solution? I tried changing the URL by changing the title of the second locale but that did not work.

Suggestions?

Hmm, I'm not sure if that would hurt your SEO, but it might not be as user-friendly. Are you looking to have the sename in the URL be in the locale the user has?

Originally Posted by Patricia Pinkney

Hello,
I've read the above posts regarding the SEO friendliness of the URLs - I have a question however regarding the fact that when you have multiple locales the url for each page remains the same regardless of the locale. For example:

Canadian English Locale
url example www.mysite.com/c-1-productname

US English Locale
url example is the same as above.

I am hearing that this is bad for SEO and that the pages will not be indexed. Does anyone else know about this and have a solution? I tried changing the URL by changing the title of the second locale but that did not work.

Suggestions?

I think it would be worth you taking a look at this thread :-
http://forums.aspdotnetstorefront.co...ad.php?t=14494


TTFN

BFG

We turn up on the first page of google in almost all areas the our customers are looking for since we started using ASPDNSF. I don't think there is any problem with the URL's....

We've got a couple of SEO issues.

firstly we use http://www.auditmypc.com/xml-sitemap.asp to generate site maps which overall is a good tool.

The problems we experience are that it will not crawl anything other than the p- titles and we have a whole range of products listed with a hp-extension.aspx so if anyone knows how we can overcome that it would be good.

If you have a problem with auditmypc - (which you don't need anyway ) surely you should be asking them for help with it?


TTFN

BFG

Interesting reply there BFG - why dont I need that service do you tihnk? I've always found it very useful for creating sitemaps.

Does aspdnsf provide an alternative or would you sugest something else?

Cheers

It's already built into the software.
Take a look at www.yourstore.com/googleindex.aspx


TTFN

BFG

googleindex.aspx seems not to include any of the topis pages or additionally created pages, therefore additional work is required to include these pages, hence the reference to auditmypc.

Problem we have is that we have modified the aspdn software to allow effectively different categories which are not focused on goods for sale. Ideally these categories would have dedicated sub-domains but aspdnsf doesn't allow that so we have had to go with separate pages with different page titles.

Its not easy for SEO and we are trying to work out the most appropriate method.

googleindex.aspx creates a list of different sitemaps - the first one of which is normally googletopics.aspx - this should contain all of your topics.

I'm not sure what modifications you've made of what additional pages you've created so am unable to help any further.
That being said though, I wouldn't worry too much about creating a sitemap for google if you're pages are linked from somewhere else (& how else would a customer/visitor ever get to them) then google will find them.


TTFN

BFG

Hi,

Ive enabled mod_rewrite, enabled in back end, renamed htaccess and added keywords to products/ categories. However I keep getting 404 errors when clicking on any link with sef urls. Any ideas?

Thanks

Dave
_______________________________________
Website I designed for canadian pay day loans company.

I don't mean to undermined anyone's responses but keyword rich urls and category based urls do recieve points in the Google, Yahoo, and Bing algorithms. Its is not worth as many points as say the Title, or Description but it is worth a few points none-the-less.

e.g.,
This:
http://www.shoestore.com/p-112-Nike-Cross-Trainer.aspx
would be worth less points than:
http://www.shoestore/mens/shoes/Nike-Cross-Trainer.aspx

One of the top seo companies in the U.S. recommends that keyword rich urls get more points (category/sub-cat/item-name) than product code (p-123.)

ref., http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-f...ion-2-released


I look forward to the day that aspdotnetstorefront supports this feature.

Thanks,
Daniel
Supermart!

As noted earlier in this thread, our next major release will allow for very easy URL rewriting right through the web.config. :-)

How important is the relevancy of your URL in SEO? For instance if I own a flower shop in NYC. Is it important to have NYCflowers.com instead of GregsTulips.com? How much consideration if any do search engines take in the URL when deciding placement?

Originally Posted by simonkatich

How important is the relevancy of your URL in SEO? For instance if I own a flower shop in NYC. Is it important to have NYCflowers.com instead of GregsTulips.com? How much consideration if any do search engines take in the URL when deciding placement?

It's just another part of the mix and impossible to place a value of importance. The bottom line with SEO is that tricks don't make a site rank well. Having a good site that is what it claims to be makes a site rank well. Having keywords in your domain and filenames helps lend credibility to the overall ranking, but those alone are worthless.

Likewise, having product IDs in the URL lends no semantic value to the site, but it also doesn't detract from the fact that keywords follow it.

For some unkown reason on my website www.ProAmmo.com all the pages inlcuding products, categories, topics ect. have the same page title, desc, keywords. In addition I have been putting all unique page titles when creating and adding a new product, however they remain still the same.

I need help, please.

Thank you in advance.

Miodrag Sam Delmic

For some unkown reason on my website www.ProAmmo.com all the pages inlcuding products, categories, topics ect. have the same page title, desc, keywords. In addition I have been putting all unique page titles when creating and adding a new product, however they remain still the same.

I'm not seeing that on your site, it looks as though the page titles change as you navigate through. It appears to be working properly!

After the post I finally figured it all out.

Thank you

To follow up on this topic, we're having difficulty seeing SEO results despite populating the Variant-level SEO fields in the data upload template, such as: V_SEKeywords, etc.

I see that only Product Pages have SE fields to edit, but seeing the "V_SE" fields in the data file makes me wonder.

Here's an example of a product page URL:
http://www.bungalowco.com/p-272-grea...aspx?vid=2543&

We see Product ranking results for 'great escapes counterfeit' but I'm wondering if we could get the URL to reflect the actual "color" or "pattern" rather than the Variant ID.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Baba,

You need to restructure your page to have SEO Symantec Markup. For instance, you want your keywords, or the product name (whatever your targeting) to be in an <h1> tag. Right now the product title "Great Escapes: Counterfeit" isnt in any tag. When I look at your page without the style sheets turned on (this is similar to how the se robots will view it) there isnt a categorical heirarchy of targeted keywords.

Read up on SEO Symantec Markup and tell your developers to restructure the code using this discipline. Here is a good example that describes your situation well.

http://www.barrywise.com/2008/05/sem...lines-for-seo/

Of course once that is complete, you still have to build links and rapport in the communities.

Daniel

Is there a way to have the same sub-category in two different places of the navigation?

We have setup sub-categories with the same names but different urls but know that this causes a duplicate content problem.

Originally Posted by newdvdreleaseseason

Baba,

You need to restructure your page to have SEO Symantec Markup. For instance, you want your keywords, or the product name (whatever your targeting) to be in an <h1> tag. Right now the product title "Great Escapes: Counterfeit" isnt in any tag. When I look at your page without the style sheets turned on (this is similar to how the se robots will view it) there isnt a categorical heirarchy of targeted keywords.

Read up on SEO Symantec Markup and tell your developers to restructure the code using this discipline. Here is a good example that describes your situation well.

http://www.barrywise.com/2008/05/sem...lines-for-seo/

Of course once that is complete, you still have to build links and rapport in the communities.

Daniel

Check out schema.org All the major search engines have come together to create micro data to further specify elements in your site. Definitely worth checking out...check out overstock.com's source code and you'll see they are using it already