URL Structure question

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My site is doing really poor on SEO but fortunately I have a 1m fan Fanpage on Facebook which drives a lot of traffic. I used to rank very well for the term “relationship advice forum” but that totally fell away in July / August.

I am now trying to build some quality links and look closely at my site structure. The first thing I need to address is the URLs. Currently as you can seek, the structure is eg hxxp://www.relationshipsurgery.com/article/13743-I_messed_up . That post is in the Relationships category of my site but I assume in Googles eyes it is just part of the “articles” sectoin.

Would this be better if I changed the word “article” to relate to the category that post sits in. So it would be hxxp://www.relationshipsurgery.com/relationships/13743-I_messed_up

Also the unique number in there is so articles with the same names as each other dont cause any problems. Should I put the number in a different place.

Also does the _ cause any issues instead of using -

My coder can change it all and 301 the old articles but I just want to get it spot on!

Any advice would be appreciated.
#search engine optimization #question #structure #url
  • Alright man here's what I would do, and this could also be why your site is doing poorly. Take those numbers out, it is making it over complicated, Google likes it simple and straight forward. And yes having the "relationships" in there would most definitely help your rankings, do something like this:

    hxxp://www.relationshipsurgery.com/relationships/I_messed_up

    In the case you can't remove the numbers then at-least make sure to use the "relationships" in the URL
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
  • Your original suggestion makes sense - look at WF, it has a "virtual folder" for each subforum, in this case "/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/", and it can't do any harm for rankings. I don't know what forum software you are running, but you need to see whether that option exists. As for the numbers, honestly, I doubt you can get rid of them as they are database ID numbers - it's how the forum software identifies the post. But WF has those numbers to and it's not doing it any harm

    What's odd about your site is that it has a lot of pages indexed, but when I Google random sentences from your content it's not coming up at all. I can't immediately see a reason for that...
  • Banned
    It's more than just the URL, example, using breadcrumbs can help associate the category keyword with the content page.

    Example breadcrumb on the content page:

    Home > Relationships > I messed up




    Example URL for the same breadcrumb (above):

    hxxp://www.domain.com/relationships/I-messed-up




    Example of the breadcrumb links Google will display for your ranked page in Google SERPs:

    [SERP title]
    domain.com > Relationships > I messed up
    [SERP description]
  • That's a very big following on facebook. May I ask how you got so many people on facebook? Did you write about this on another thread that I can possibly read about?
    Thank you
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    URL Structure question

    My site is doing really poor on SEO but fortunately I have a 1m fan Fanpage on Facebook which drives a lot of traffic. I used to rank very well for the term “relationship advice forum” but that totally fell away in July / August. I am now trying to build some quality links and look closely at my site structure. The first thing I need to address is the URLs. Currently as you can seek, the structure is eg hxxp://www.relationshipsurgery.com/article/13743-I_messed_up . That post is in the Relationships category of my site but I assume in Googles eyes it is just part of the “articles” sectoin.