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Digital Team at The Woodland Trust
30 January 2008 11:04am
Hi
We are currently redeveloping the Woodland Trust website and using Microsoft's MOSS content management technology as its base - and there is one "feature" it has that is concerning me from an SEO point of view.
The way pages are stored in the directory structure, place all pages in a folder called /pages, all images in /images and documents in /documents - resulting in a url string for example of woodland-trust.org.uk/campaigns/climate-change/Pages/what-can-I-do.aspx
With the use of keywords in urls being so important to Google etc and the relevance a page being supported by the use of the pages keywords within the url string - I am concerned that the insertion of /Pages/ into every url will have a negative effect.
It is also not very user friendly to have /Pages/ in the url as it serves no purpose to help describe the pages content - it is purely a technical thing.
Would appreciate peoples thoughts, is this something I should be concerned about and actively persue a technical solution to try and cloak its existence with an isapi filter?
Many thank
Jon Parsons
Search Marketing Director at http://www.marketappeal.co.uk/
01 February 2008 12:21pm
Hi Jon,
What you describe is a fairly common CMS issue, but nothing too serious all the same.
While you are right to say that Google cares about keywords in the url, adding the /pages/ folder may very slightly dilute the effect of the other keywords present.
Having said that however the page's title is much more important that it's urls, especially as the right keywords are present anyway, so this wouldn't, as far as I'm concerned be an issue.
Also, people are unlikely to be put off by this, as most urls/CMS systems tend to have at least one "organisational" folder or a unique identifier string (such as /XYU12341/ anyway.
Personally, therefore I'd say that if SEO is a priority there are almost certainly going to be more important issues than this one to pit your whits against.
Feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.Kind regards,
Anthony Sharot
SEO Consultant
On 11:04:46 30 January 2008 JonParsons wrote:
Director at Watson Hall Ltd
01 February 2008 19:07pm
Since the site hasn't been launched yet, you still do have the option to alter these URLs. Once launched you would have to worry about existing search engine indexing and rankings, bookmarks and links from other sites.
But it looks like the existing site also uses similar URLs (e.g. www.woodland-trust.org.uk/news/subindex.asp?aid=1381) so I think you still have those issues to consider.
The URLs in your question and your mention of an ISAPI filter give the game away about the technologies used (best to avoid); you can use such technologies to mask the actual file types as well as to provide shorter/friendlier URLs. Something to rewrite the URLs could be used to redirect or rewrite requests to the existing well-indexed (2,800 in Google) pages and links to pages (1,800 in Google).
So, I'd say the main concern is the URLs of the existing site if these differ from the new site.
Colin Watson
Technical Director
Watson Hall Ltd for website security