The Situation I've inherited a site with what I consider a poor URL format.
The site is about to be completely revamped - new design, new CMS. Based on early discovery, there will be some IA changes, some content suppressed, some added plus a certain amount of reorganization. The site is small, roughly 250 pages. Maybe 20-30 of those will be suppressed and perhaps 20-40 pages added. The internal linking will be significantly reorganized. So a
fair number of URLs will change, go away or get added no matter what. It seems like if we were going to change URL formats, now would be the time.
There is much to change and most decisions are easy. The one I hesitate on is changes to the URL structure.
What's wrong with the current format? -
mixed case which is a problem on Windows-based hosting because (at least on the current platform) you can't catch incorrect case easily and canonicalize those URLs. It also tends to split them in reporting (GA for example - though you can create a filter to convert case, since we haven't two URLs that are identical except for case get reported separately).
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flat - everything is one level off root
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extensions- I don't really care, but if I were starting from scratch I wouldn't do it that way of course.
Previous Discussions Here Most of the discussions on the subject here revolve around the value of keywords in URLs and misconceptions about it being better for SEO to have URLs that indicate something is closer to root.
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webmasterworld.com...] (closer to root idea).
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webmasterworld.com...] (keyword in hierarchical vs flat URLs discussion and multi-category problem - see next)
Some have noted a potential major downfall of hierarchical URLs - if your site has multiple possible hierarchies you run the risk of having multiple URLs to your page. That is if you auto-generate URLs based on product category and something is in both the "large" category and the "blue" category you can end up with two valid URLs with identical product listings if you aren't careful:
/widgets/large/blue
/widgets/blue/large
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webmasterworld.com...] (multi-category concern)
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webmasterworld.com...] (ditto)
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webmasterworld.com...] (concern about how long to get the new structure indexed).
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webmasterworld.com...] (most recent discussion on the topic)
What are the advantages? So if I don't think that the new URL structure will have much positive impact on SEO and carries some risk, why consider it? A few items, in no particular order
1.
Reporting. You can't use the content drilldown feature of Google Analytics. It makes it harder to see traffic patterns for logical buckets of content. I end up collecting sets of URLs and writing massive regular expressions to try to pull reporting on the various sections of the site.
2.
Topic hinting to Google. Alan Bleiweiss was adamant at Pubcon that not having a hierarchical URL structure meant that you were removing important clues to Google regarding related content and hierarchical importance. In one of the threads cited above, pageoneresults said that non-hierarchical URLs are like putting all your papers in the same drawer. Personally, I've always thought that your internal linking structure was way more important, but I'm open to the idea that hierarchical URLs might help... I just haven't seen it.
3.
Breadcrumbs in SERPS. That said, now that Google presents breadcrumb navigation in the SERPs, it seems like a hierarchical URL structure makes that much more likely.
4.
Consistent UI. I've always tried to have my URL structure reflect my breadcrumb structure if the site is highly hierarchical. In cases where a page might be reachable via different categories/silos, I usually make the "leaf" pages (end of hierarchy pages) flat as often it's hard to have a breadcrumb in that case. Still, this site is highly hierarchical, so I think the match between main nav topic, the breadcrumb structure and URL structure would be consistent.
5.
URI as UI. It allows users to edit URLs as a form of navigation. A usability expert from IBM said many years ago (when the web was newer) that she had never seen a user edit a URL in thousands of usability tests. But I do it all the time and wonder if more users do these days.
6.
Descriptive. More descriptive URLs to hopefully improve CTR in general, not just in SERPs.
What's Holding Me Back? Two things
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Cool URIs Don't Change (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html). I'm pretty sure the URI of that article has changed over the years though.
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FUD - it's a small site, but there is lots of money on the table and 2016 is likely to be challenging already (which is why the site is getting revamped)
What Are Your Thoughts? What do you think about risks/benefits? If you were rebuilding a site from the ground up, what would you do?
Rewards and Risks of Changing to Hierarchical URL Structure
