How do I handle the URL of an article that sits in more than one category

Question

In our knowledge base (hosted in Wordpress) we have one article that is relevant to 2 categories. I do not want to duplicate the article and have it sitting separately in each category for fear of negative SEO.

For example, both Category A and Category B share the same article.

Our URL structure is:

example.com/knowledge-base/category-name/article-name

Now there is a problem, if the article name is the same, which category name goes into the URL?

I think this is breaking the theme that we are trying to use. Is there a standard way of handling this kind of thing? Would it be better to duplicate the article in each category?

Answer 1

I would consider removing "knowledge-base/category-name/" from your URL altogether. Those aren't helping SEO, they are only making your URLs longer, harder to remember, and harder to type.

Keywords in the URL path are a very minor ranking factor now. Your article name is going to have plenty of keywords anyway.

Without the category name in the URL, you can easily place articles into as many categories as you choose.

Answer 2

The right way to avoid SEO duplicates is to use a canonical URL for each page.

So your article could show in as many categories as you'd want and the canonical URL would be set to the URL of the article itself.

Here are Google results which might help you implement this: https://www.google.de/search?q=wordpress+plugin+canonical+url&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=R28aVZnPIYjfavyRgVg

Answer 3

I think you might want to go to a link like this:

// Close to domain:
http://www.example.com/article-name
// Or, alternatively, add a 'prefix' (e.g.: /blog/article, or /products/article):
http://www.example.com/articles/article-name 

This will improve the SEO power of the url, because it's a lot shorter, and the relevant part (article-name) is closer to the url. Both aren't mayor, but every bit helps.

This also fixes your category problem, they both link to this page. You can try the canonical method as suggested, but they you'd have to choose which category you want to use, and for which you want to drop SEO (because the canonical just told the Bots this flow to this page isn't supposed to).