I am currently coming to the end of my first major website that I have developed since becoming a Level 2 Umbraco certified developer. The site is an upgrade from an old dated site running on a custom CMS to a fully automated Umbraco installation that works with a 3rd party product and its web services to generate content pages based upon entries made to a database on our client's shared desktop software.
As is always the case, our client after reviewing the site has some concerns with regards to SEO and how Umbraco Urls are structured as they believe their products and services are nested too far down in the tree and that this somehow effects their SEO negatively. I will admit now that I am no SEO expert and consider the whole SEO thing a bit of a black art that seems to change each week so can anyone give me any advice with regards to this in an Umbraco context?
The way we have structured the pages is as follows:
(1) = Level
{X} = Not in Main Navigation
(1)->Home
(2)--> Destinations
(3)---> South America [Continent]
(4)----> Argentina [Country] {X}
(5)-----> Buenos Aires [Area] {X}
(6)------> Buenos Aires [City] {X}
(7)-------> Package Product 1 {X}
(7)-------> Package Product 2 {X}
(7)-------> Package Product 3 {X}
(7)-------> Hotel Product 1 {X}
(7)-------> Hotel Product 2 {X}
(7)-------> Hotel Product 3 {X}
(7)-------> Activity Product 1 {X}
(7)-------> Activity Product 2 {X}
(7)-------> Activity Product 3 {X}
(4)----> Bolivia {X}
(3)---> North America [Continent]
(2)--> Holiday Types
(3)---> Cruise
(3)---> Family Holiday
(2)--> Places To Stay {X}
(2)--> Things To Do {X}
(2)--> About Us
The idea is a user can drill down to the destination that they wish to look at right down to a city level to see the products that are available in that specific area.
When on a continent page, all of the holiday packages that are descendants of that continent are displayed.
If you select a country from the side navigation then these packages are filtered further so that only the ones in that particular country are shown.
If you click an area within the country then these are again filtered down further.
Regardless of where you access the products their url is as follows:
This of course if because of the tree structure that Umbraco follows by default.
The problem here is that my client wants the URLS to be:
www.mysite.com/southamerica/argentina
so that they cut out certain pages to make the urls shorter which I have advised against.
They have also started using the umbracoAltUrl property to try and rewrite some of these urls to what they want them to be however, this I believe is worse for SEO as it creates more than one link to a page so that in the case of argentina it can be accessed like this:
Does anyone have any advise with regards to this and any experience as the whether or not this level of nesting in Umbraco is indeed bad for SEO? My main issue is that it is only now when we are coming to the end of development that they are raising these issues and altering the structure in Umbraco will essentially mean rewriting a lot of the site which we do not really have the time or resources to do.
Any help or opinions on this issue would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Jason
N.B Before anyone mentions it, I know that with web projects like this you should always address SEO when moving over a site before you start development and this is the way I would usually do it but unfortunately I was brought into my company when the planning and design stage of the project had been completed so I had to work with what was already there and this was a stage that was omitted by both client and my company.
Add in some quality landing pages at the levels they want to satisfy the SEO dogs.
Also, add in quality content pages in general to attract visitors. I don't think their target customer is looking for argentina, they're looking for fun things to do, great places to stay, how to save money, where to get the best steak, yadda yadda yadda.
The other thing you might have done is put the package pages up at a higher level (argentina), added a picker or dropdown for area and/or city, and used code to deliver them from country pages.
If you already have the site populated with a ton of packages, changing it is going to be a grind no matter which way you go but they're not going to get a url w/o at least a package on the end of it regardless. They could make sure that the page title is something relevant, so instead of 'package-1' it says 'incredibly fun in the sun beach vacation in argentia'.
If you're up on the way the search engines are doing things these days, I think we need to be looking at providing better content at the granular level as well as better intermediate content on landing pages and blog/news/article pages. Google wants people to get their information w/out even leaving their search page to visit your site, so you have to have more going for you than just a pic and price of a widget at the end of long and tedious url.
It is common for multiple breadcrumbs to lead to the same place on a site. Google introduced something called "canonical urls" for this purpose. It allows you so show the relation between the two pages and choose which one you want displayed in the search engines. 301s should be reserved for content that has already been indexed and now moved to a different path.
Umbraco 7 Urls and SEO
Hi all,
I am currently coming to the end of my first major website that I have developed since becoming a Level 2 Umbraco certified developer. The site is an upgrade from an old dated site running on a custom CMS to a fully automated Umbraco installation that works with a 3rd party product and its web services to generate content pages based upon entries made to a database on our client's shared desktop software.
As is always the case, our client after reviewing the site has some concerns with regards to SEO and how Umbraco Urls are structured as they believe their products and services are nested too far down in the tree and that this somehow effects their SEO negatively. I will admit now that I am no SEO expert and consider the whole SEO thing a bit of a black art that seems to change each week so can anyone give me any advice with regards to this in an Umbraco context?
This is where the site currently sits if you wish to take a look: http://tinyurl.com/umbracourlstructure
The way we have structured the pages is as follows: (1) = Level {X} = Not in Main Navigation
The idea is a user can drill down to the destination that they wish to look at right down to a city level to see the products that are available in that specific area.
When on a continent page, all of the holiday packages that are descendants of that continent are displayed.
If you select a country from the side navigation then these packages are filtered further so that only the ones in that particular country are shown.
If you click an area within the country then these are again filtered down further.
Regardless of where you access the products their url is as follows:
This of course if because of the tree structure that Umbraco follows by default.
The problem here is that my client wants the URLS to be:
so that they cut out certain pages to make the urls shorter which I have advised against.
They have also started using the umbracoAltUrl property to try and rewrite some of these urls to what they want them to be however, this I believe is worse for SEO as it creates more than one link to a page so that in the case of argentina it can be accessed like this:
and this
which Google will deem as duplicate content.
Does anyone have any advise with regards to this and any experience as the whether or not this level of nesting in Umbraco is indeed bad for SEO? My main issue is that it is only now when we are coming to the end of development that they are raising these issues and altering the structure in Umbraco will essentially mean rewriting a lot of the site which we do not really have the time or resources to do.
Any help or opinions on this issue would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Jason
N.B Before anyone mentions it, I know that with web projects like this you should always address SEO when moving over a site before you start development and this is the way I would usually do it but unfortunately I was brought into my company when the planning and design stage of the project had been completed so I had to work with what was already there and this was a stage that was omitted by both client and my company.
Not an expert but my opinions are:
Add in some quality landing pages at the levels they want to satisfy the SEO dogs.
Also, add in quality content pages in general to attract visitors. I don't think their target customer is looking for argentina, they're looking for fun things to do, great places to stay, how to save money, where to get the best steak, yadda yadda yadda.
The other thing you might have done is put the package pages up at a higher level (argentina), added a picker or dropdown for area and/or city, and used code to deliver them from country pages.
If you already have the site populated with a ton of packages, changing it is going to be a grind no matter which way you go but they're not going to get a url w/o at least a package on the end of it regardless. They could make sure that the page title is something relevant, so instead of 'package-1' it says 'incredibly fun in the sun beach vacation in argentia'.
If you're up on the way the search engines are doing things these days, I think we need to be looking at providing better content at the granular level as well as better intermediate content on landing pages and blog/news/article pages. Google wants people to get their information w/out even leaving their search page to visit your site, so you have to have more going for you than just a pic and price of a widget at the end of long and tedious url.
It is common for multiple breadcrumbs to lead to the same place on a site. Google introduced something called "canonical urls" for this purpose. It allows you so show the relation between the two pages and choose which one you want displayed in the search engines. 301s should be reserved for content that has already been indexed and now moved to a different path.
Canonical url: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
Best advice for your client is to write url in a way a human can best read it for clickthrough improvements: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en
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