Hi everyone I have two questions regarding URL structure. When I type in the url for my domain [noparse]www.example.com[/noparse] i notice that the domain changes to [noparse]http://example.com[/noparse] does this have any affect on the SEO of the website?
The second thought is that I notice that a lot of websites have their blogs organized [noparse]http://blog.example.com[/noparse] rather than [noparse]www.example.com/blog[/noparse]. Does it have any advantages in structuring it as the first example?
In terms of SEO, it really doesn’t matter what structure you use as long as it is reasonably concise and consistent, and for preference uses the correct static/dynamic form. The only real pitfall is if you don’t redirect/rewrite your URLs so you end up with both www.example.com and example.com appearing to point to different pages (as far as the search spiders are concerned) when really they are pointing at the same pages. That will mean that there is a risk that links to your site will not always use the same format and your link juice will be split between the two versions of the URL rather than all channelled into the one.
The biggest danger with using the blog.example.com format is that some people are not good at URLs and assume that every URL starts with www., so will type it in as www.blog.example.com, which almost certainly won’t work. It also means that when you type it into a text format such as a forum comment (like here!), email, etc, it won’t be recognised as a URL unless you include the http://, so it won’t automagically linkify itself. If you stick to www.example.com/blog then most contexts will recognise that as a hyperlink and make it clickable, which is a good thing. So from a usability point of view, it’s better to use www.example.com/blog.
Off Topic:
When you’re using dummy URLs to explain the point, please don’t allow them to become clickable links. If they start with http:// or www. then you need to un-tick the “Automatically parse links in text” box. If you leave it ticked, we end up with a load of outbound links to dummy sites.
thanks for the feedback guys! The thing is that I am using wordpress for the first time and i noticed that when i type in the domain name that i automatically get forwarded to example.com…so it shouldn’t be issue as long it’s not split from the search engines point of view. So the questions that comes is how can i make sure it is not split?
If you are getting forwarded it’s a good thing, and means you shouldn’t have an issue.
To find out for sure you may need to look in your .htaccess file which you will have to access via Filezilla or which ever client you use to upload to the site. Search Google for “canonial .htaccess” and you’ll find the answers you need.
I think you can get best Idea for URL structure use Woorank add-ones. with this tool we can defined all type of sites review like - keywords density, URL structure, Meta Keywords or Meta Description, W3C Validation and many more about live site.
It generally doesn’t matter much for the URL which are pointing to the same domain from SEO point of view. But its always better to have a proper URL structure and the landing pages URL should be well managed so that spiders can reach till those pages easily.