URL re-structuring to reduce keywords / possible fluffing

[webdevfv]

Hi all

Been thinking about doing this for a long time but am now especially concerned because my inner product pages are not ranking at all - just homepage / category pages / blogs

Would appreciate your thoughts on these 2 major changes...

Brands
domainname.co.uk/widget-makers/brand.html
to
domainname.co.uk/brand/index.php
or is it best to redirect to
domainname.co.uk/brand/ - i.e. don't mention file extension in links

Products
domainname.co.uk/widgets/01013/brand/product-name.html
to
domainname.co.uk/brand/product-name.html


Is it a no-brainer that rankings will pick up or should I concentrate on other aspects of the website and link building etc - site is well established

Thanks in advance

[tedster]

Of course there's no guarantee that this change will fix any ranking problems. In general, the file path of a url is more of a click-through factor than a ranking factor these days. That said, I definitely prefer a short URL and I'd say you're looking in the right direction.

One important piece of advice: make this the last time you change URL structure by making EVERY URL extension-less. So even for a product page, make it domainname.co.uk/brand/product-name and don't use the ".html".

[webdevfv]

Thanks tedster

It's always good to run things past a pro. I hadn't thought of removing the .html from the product pages

It's all mod-rewrite so can easily remove the .html

However, I've been working on this and can't seem to remove the id element so will end up with something like:
domainname.co.uk/brand/product-name-01013
instead of
domainname.co.uk/brand/product-name

Anyone had experience of this and would you recommend putting the IDnumber, i.e. 01013, before or after the product-name

[tedster]

I don't think before or after matters much - but be sure that your server doesn't resolve alphabetical typos just because the number is correct. And once you accomplish that, you usually can find a way to drop the number, too.

[g1smd]

I prefer the ID number first, as this makes things easier when you get URL requests with appended trailing junk on the end. This happens when blog and forum software performs auto-linking on URLs but includes characters that are not meant to be in the link, or the end of the URL gets inadvertently cut off.

example.com/10234-the-product-name vs.
example.com/10234-the-product-name%20,%20%3A vs.
example.com/10234-the-produ

The first thing your script should do is check if the ID number is valid. If not, send a direct HTTP 404 header. If the ID is valid, check the appended product name, and if it is not EXACTLY correct, send a 301 redirect to the correct URL. If both the ID and the product name are correct, serve the content.

[g1smd]

For products in multiple categories, the danger with the old system is that each product could have many URLs:

example.com/widgets/01013/brand/product-name.html
example.com/gadgets/01013/brand/product-name.html
example.com/doodads/01013/brand/product-name.html
example.com/thingys/01013/brand/product-name.html

Yes, go extensionless, but be aware that URLs ending in a trailing slash, are for folders or are for the index page of a folder.

For pages do not use a trailing slash.

Now that your product URLs look like example.com/01013-the-product-name you have one URL for the product but it can be linked to from example.com/widgets, example.com/gadgets, example.com/doodads, etc, and the product page should link back to all of those using "Find more widgets", "Find more gadgets", "Find more stuff", links.

[webdevfv]

Thanks for those tips. I'm aware of the problem regarding the urls - I've often wondered if it was this that was causing my products not to be ranked - a penalty of some sort.

Something I will need to make sure is correctly applied when I change it over.