Tabitha Anderson originally shared to SEO Questions (Ask an SEO Question.):
Hello Everyone!
I recently had a wonderful convo w/ Micah Fisher and he suggested I post here with a question. I want to thank anyone in advance that actually reads through this all b/c it’s going to be a novel to provide all of the details. In addition, I just want to mention that in no way am I looking for anyone to solve this for me, just looking for some much appreciated insight and experience.
I am in the midst of building a custom CMS where search is the primary functionality users will interact with. I am trying to hash out my default URL structure for search queries. I am trying to make them as SEO-friendly as possible. The company I work for already has client’s live on an old CMS, so migration is a bit part of this. This means being as careful as possible to not tank SEO is also really important.
Our search form includes a field for keyword, location, and location can have a radius applied.
Originally, I wanted the URL’s to follow this structure:
domain.com/search/keyword/location/radius/page
& my developer came back and said that this would result in the following possible variiations:
1. keyword string
2. keyword, page string, int
3. keyword, location string, string
4. keyword, location, page string, string, int
5. keyword, location, radius string, string, int
6. keyword, location, radius, page string, string, int, int
7. keyword, lat, long string, float, float
8. keyword, lat, long, page string, float, float, int
9. keyword, lat, long, radius string, float, float, int
10. keyword, lat, long, radius, page string, float, float, int, int
11. location string
12. location, page string, int
13. location, radius string, int
14. location, radius, page string, int, int
15. lat, long float, float
16. lat, long, page float, float, int
17. lat, long, radius float, float, int
18. lat, long, radius, page float, float, int, int
Because we are trying to auto-detect our client’s old search URL’s and route them to the new ones, the above scenario would make it almost impossible to manage. I need this to be possible as this is what they are promising client’s as a preventative SEO feature of migration.
My developers have asked me to please use some variation of query strings. I know this is not SEO-friendly, and I am trying to find some middle ground. SEO-friendly enough while also making it friendlier for development.
Where I am stuck is on what to name the parameters. The names I want to use are 7 & 8 characters long and I feel like that could be too much.
This is what I am leaning toward:
domain.com/search/keyword=manager & location=new+york & radius=....
the rest after radius is not my focus as it’s the first 2 values that are important for us to rank for.
I am also thinking about maybe:
domain.com/keyword/search/keyword=manager & where=new+york...
but I am not sure how clear where is as a parameter to search engines. I feel like it should make sense, but I have no experience using parameter terms that aren’t very specific to the value type.
In my career, I have re-built custom CMS platforms and had to migrate with a similar scenario. We weren’t as on top of ensuring the proper URL structures and it was detrimental. I am trying to avoid this as best I can, and know that there’s no magic answer. I am looking to have good reason backing up my decision and in my role I am the sole decision maker on this.
Another thing I am entertaining is storing these pages as static (query parameters cleaned out) pages in the sitemap. In my past experience we had done this and it worked extremely well. This was a few years ago though, and I am getting a little kick-back about the value of this. We had a job that ran daily and crawled through all of the possible queries, re-wrote the URLs and dropped “.html” at the end and saved them to XML. From what I am reading online, search engines have gotten better at reading query strings, but in my current research of our biggest competitors, the pages I am finding on Google are their static versions.
Ok, I will stop now :)
THANKS AGAIN TO ANYONE WHO READS THIS IN ADVANCE!!
Cheers,
Tabitha Anderson
