Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Discover Brand Authority
      Moz Pro

      Discover Brand Authority

      Learn More
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      What is your Brand Authority?
      Moz

      What is your Brand Authority?

      Take the quiz
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      June 3 & 4, 2024, Seattle
      MozCon

      June 3 & 4, 2024, Seattle

      Get tickets
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature: Moz Pro

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Internal Site Structure Question (URL Formation and Internal Link Design)

    Internal Site Structure Question (URL Formation and Internal Link Design)

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    5
    1027
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • BeytzNet
      BeytzNet last edited by

      Hi,

      I have an e-commerce website that has an articles section:

      There is an articles.aspx file that can be reached from the top menu and it holds links to all of the articles as follows:

      xxx.com/articles/article1.aspx
      xxx.com/articles/article2.aspx

      I want to add several new articles under a new sections, for example a complete set of articles under the title of "buying guide" and the question is what would be the best way?

      I was thinking of adding a "computers-buying-guides.aspx" accessible from the top menu / footer and from it linking to:

      xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/what-to-check-prior-to-buying-a-laptop.aspx
      xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/weight-vs-performance.aspx 
      etc.

      Any thoughts / recommendations?

      Thanks

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Brother22
        Brother22 last edited by

        With an eCommerce site I would always recommend having as flat of a site architecture as possible. This make's it easy for the spiders to crawl and the users to find the content without having to dig or land through a SERP. If you are adding new content to your article section that you want to be unrelated to the existing content in the current sub-folder being used, then creating a directory to house the new content with a more descriptive sub-folder name is the best idea in my opinion. I would make sure to have the link in the header OR the footer but not both. Just design it for whatever makes sense from the user's end and you will be in good shape.

        I would also recommend that you label the pages with the Google recommendation tags (rel=next, rel=prev, and the not-so-trusty rel="canonical") and identify those pages you don't want indexed with Bing URL Normalization.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • anthonytjm
          anthonytjm last edited by

          Ok, on your current articles page, make sure you don't exceed 100 links on that page including all other site navigation.If you do, create a second articles page and start listing articles on that page to balance the load out for the regular articles section. If your getting likes and good feedback i would change that. If you ever had to, simply 301 redirect so you pass all the link juice to new page.

          I think I would then create a new top level link under articles called buying guide and have that link to a buying-guide articles page where you can layout your buying guide articles in like fashion to your original articles landing page.

          Hope that makes sense. I can see it in my mind but sometimes that's hard to put in type.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • BeytzNet
            BeytzNet @anthonytjm last edited by

            What I currently have is like your second suggestion, main page with many articles sections. However I have too many articles on it.

            Besides, I believe that the guides section will be very good and is worth standing on its own.

            The reason I'm not changing the structure of the existing articles is simply because the articles there already have many social signals (likes etc.) which I don't want to lose when I change the URL.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • anthonytjm
              anthonytjm last edited by

              If your planning on adding several different article directories why not have a main articles link from main navigation, then have droop down menus for sub directory articles? So it would look something like this:

              /articles/

              /articles/buying-guide/

              /articles/software/

              /articles/hardware/

              etc, etc, etc.

              Or you could have your main articles landing page list all links under various sub categories with H tag titles separating the directories.

              BeytzNet 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              Browse Questions

              Explore more categories

              • Moz Tools

                Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

              • SEO Tactics

                Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

              • Community

                Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

              • Digital Marketing

                Chat about tactics outside of SEO

              • Research & Trends

                Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

              • Support

                Connect on product support and feature requests.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • Miniorek

                Weird Site is linking to our site and links appears to be broken

                I have got a lot of weird links indexed from this page: http://kzs.uere.info/files/images/dining-table-and-2-upholstered-chairs.html When clicking the link it shows 404. Also, the spam score is huge. What do you guys suggest to do with this?
                Could it be done by somebody to get our rankings down or domain penalized? Best Regards
                Mike & Alex

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Miniorek
                0
              • Onedirect_uk

                Can multiple geotargeting hreflang tags be set in one URL? International SEO question

                ​Hi All, Thank you for this great post! I have a question please. If i target www.onedirect.co.nl/en/ in English for Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, are the tags below correct? English for Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg: http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-nl" /> http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-be" /> http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-lu" /> AND Targeting Holland and Belgium in Dutch: Pour la page www.onedirect.co.nl on peut inclure ce tag: http://www.example.co.nl" hreflang="nl-nl" /> http://www.example.co.nl" hreflang="nl-be" /> thanks a lot for your help!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Onedirect_uk
                0
              • Blink-SEO

                Do internal links from non-indexed pages matter?

                Hi everybody! Here's my question. After a site migration, a client has seen a big drop in rankings. We're trying to narrow down the issue. It seems that they have lost around 15,000 links following the switch, but these came from pages that were blocked in the robots.txt file. I was wondering if there was any research that has been done on the impact of internal links from no-indexed pages. Would be great to hear your thoughts! Sam

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO
                0
              • nick-name123

                Keyword rich internal linking - problem?

                Had an interesting situation today.. We write daily news articles on our site. In each article we link out to two sources that we are writing about (credible sources) and we do one or two internal links. For example.. 'Today McDonald's have announced that they are purchasing more blue widgets in order to increase their opportunity to appeal to a larger market.' So in that sentence you can see one outbound link and one inbound to blue widgets on our site. I got an email today from a large company who we have written an article about in the industry and they have asked me to remove the link to their site.. I actually asked them why and this was their response. 'We're concerned because of the number of keyword-rich internal links in the article, and are worried that being included alongside them might be misinterpreted by Google as an artificial link.' Fristly, do they really have anything to be worried about?.. but more importantly, with our internal linking, do we have anything to be worried about?.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name123
                0
              • ThridHour

                OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site

                I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour
                0
              • digitalops

                International URL Puzzle

                Hello, I have 4 different URL's going to 4 different countries that all contain the same content and Google is seeing them as duplicate pages. For ecommerce reasons I have to have these 4 pages separated. Here is a example of the pages below so you can see the URL structure: www.example/com/canada www.example.com/australia www.example.com/usa www.example.com/UK How do I fix this duplicate content problem? Thanks!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalops
                0
              • eTundra

                Best Format for URLs on large Ecommerce Site?

                I saw this article, http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/common-ecommerce-technical-seo-problems/, and noticed that Geoff mentioned that product URLs format should be in one of the following ways: Product Page: site.com/product-name Product Page: site.com/category/sub-category/product-name However, for SEO, is there a preferred way? I understand that the top one may be better to prevent duplicate page issues, but I would imagine that the bottom would be better for conversion (maybe the user backtracks to site.com/category/sub-category/ to see other products that he may be interested in). Also, I'd imagine that the top URL would not be a great way to distribute link juice since everything would be attached to the root, right?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eTundra
                0
              • boxcarpress

                Url structure for multiple search filters applied to products

                We have a product catalog with several hundred similar products. Our list of products allows you apply filters to hone your search, so that in fact there are over 150,000 different individual searches you could come up with on this page. Some of these searches are relevant to our SEO strategy, but most are not. Right now (for the most part) we save the state of each search with the fragment of the URL, or in other words in a way that isn't indexed by the search engines. The URL (without hashes) ranks very well in Google for our one main keyword. At the moment, Google doesn't recognize the variety of content possible on this page. An example is: http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html#style=vintage&color=blue&season=spring We're moving towards a more indexable URL structure and one that could potentially save the state of all 150,000 searches in a way that Google could read. An example would be: http://www.example.com/main-keyword/vintage/blue/spring/ I worry, though, that giving so many options in our URL will confuse Google and make a lot of duplicate content. After all, we only have a few hundred products and inevitably many of the searches will look pretty similar. Also, I worry about losing ground on the main http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html page, when it's ranking so well at the moment. So I guess the questions are: Is there such a think as having URLs be too specific? Should we noindex or set rel=canonical on the pages whose keywords are nested too deep? Will our main keyword's page suffer when it has to share all the inbound links with these other, more specific searches?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress
                0
              Moz logo
              • Contact
              • Community
              • Free Trial
              • Terms & Privacy
              • Accessibility
              • Jobs
              • Help
              • News & Press
              • MozCon
              © 2021 - 2024 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.