SEO-friendly URL structurehelping search engines make sense of your site

What will I learn by the last slide?• Common URL structure problems you may

encounter• SEO-friendly URL structure best practices• Useful resources to help you along

Common URL structure problems• Gibberish URLs• Multiple URLs pointing to homepage• Duplicate URLs caused by sorting options• Duplicate URLs caused by tracking parameters

Gibberish URLs

The URLs that don’t tell you much about the content of the page, lack keywords and are rich in useless characters.

Example:http://rapidassisttech.com/shop/item.aspx?catid=23&itemid=1068&color=456&ssid=109

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Multiple URLs pointing to homepage

In this case the homepage of a website may be reached via several paths. As the result the links’ strength is dissipated.

Example:http://mydomain.com/http://www.mydomain.com/http://mydomain.com/index.html

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Duplicate URLs caused by sorting options

A product in an e-commerce store may belong to various categories and as such be reached via different URLs

Example:Women -> Shop Brands -> Levi's -> Levi's Field JacketWomen -> Jackets-> Levi's -> Levi's Field Jacket

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Duplicate URLs caused by tracking parameters

Some websites are using session ID parameters in URLs to track their visitors. As the result, a page with the same content may have different URLs.

Example:http://mydomain.com/index.html?ssid=87658765ghhttp://mydomain.com/index.html?ssid=87658765gh

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SEO-friendly URL structure best practices

• Sign up for Webmaster Tools • Create a robots.txt file• Submit an XML Sitemap • Make use of canonical tags

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Sign up for Webmaster Tools

Both Google and Bing provide webmaster tools that let you diagnose potential URL structure problems.

They may help:• Track HTML errors• Find duplicate content• Find broken links• Adjust URL parameters settings• Set preferred page (www or non-www)

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Create a robots.txt file

It's a text file that lists which pages or sections of your site the crawler should NOT visit.

Example:User-agent: *Disallow: /cgi-bin/Disallow: /tmp/Disallow: /~joe/

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Submit an XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap is a list of pages of your site that should be to be crawled and indexed by the search engines. Example:<urlset> <url> <loc>http://webmeup.com/</loc> <priority>1</priority> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://webmeup.com/getting-tarted.html</loc> <priority>0.80</priority> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url>

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Make use of canonical tags

If multiple URLs point to the same content, canonical tags are used to assign a primary page. The tag should placed at non-primary pages.

Example:<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php? "/>

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Helpful resources1. Learn to make pretty URLs:httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

2. Webmasters tools:www.google.com/webmasters/toolswww.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

3. Robots.txt official pagewww.robotstxt.org

4. Google comments about rel=canonicalsupport.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

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