URL Path. What is better for SEO

[CKerr]

Hello Moz people,

Is it better for SEO to have a URL path like this:

flowersite.com/anniversary_flowers/dozen_roses

OR

flowersite.com/dozen_roses

Is it better to have the full trail of pages in the URL?

[RafalJ]

There is no golden rule but generally yes, the page higher in a structure would be considered slightly more important, especially if your sitemap indicates page importance automatically, but a proper structure has far more benefits.

As long as you don' overcomplicate your structure it wouldn't make much difference whether your roses are at:

domain.com/roses

or

domain.com/anniversary-flowers/roses

as for no 4 - could it be that roses would fit many of the categories and therefore have been taken out of the structure to avoid duplicate content issues?

I often see pages deeper in the category tree ranking just as high if not higher than top categories for their respective keywords. At the end of the day Pete, it's the content that will rank your page not the url.

Using common sense, do you think Google would promote a model of websites where all pages and categories are always in the root? Would you use a library where all books are stuffed into 1 section? I don't think so.

[PeteC12]

Hi All,

I am no expert but we have just  done redone our url structure and these are points we had to weigh up.

1. I thought the closer to the root domain the more important the  page ?
2. However, it's always not feasible to have every page only one level from root so what we did , is have the url structure follow the bread crumb structure of our site and I believe this works well
3. That makes it consistent and easy for the user/crawlers to understand
4. Saying that though, if roses are one of your best sellers all year round , then it may warrant to have that url as closer to root as possible still have others using a category structure. I have seen that done on some large sites that sell alot of a particular item

Pete

[RafalJ]

This is very often overlooked but in my opinion the right URL structure is critical for any site, because the on site optimisation and content creation for landing pages will be very much determined by the structure of your URL's. Logical structure also helps users understanding and navigating the site.

I always suggest a "library" approach, so creating a logical structure similar to a library where a book (or a product/service/article etc.) falls under one parent category, which falls under a higher parent category, similar to:

science-books/physics/newton-inventions

entertainment-books/childrens-books/harry-potter

I your case the first example of URL path makes more sense, but the question is - are dozen roses only anniversary flowers? Spend a few hours organising your products into categories that make logical sense and create a URL structure to reflect that but keeping in mind the keywords people are searching for to find your products. It's not easy so don't rush it.

Ah and use hyphes (-) rather than underscores (_) in your urls...

[IM_Learner]

Hi Garrettkite,

There are 2 things that I would answer:

• Firstly, don't use underscore (_) in the url. Instead, use hyphens (-). E.g. domain1.com/inner-page.aspx
• Secondly, whether to have a longer url or shorter version is totally your call. It is better to have a flat structure as much as possible. Never go for very long urls e.g. domain1.com/directory1/directory2/this-is-the-inner-page.aspx. On the other hand, focus on the structure of the website from user's point of view. Is it intuitive? Can a user reach to the inner page easily? But in some cases you may have to use longer urls which is again conditional.

Till date I have successfully worked on more than 100 sites by following the above standards.

Regards

[garrettkite]

I have read a lot about how it is important to keep URLs as short as possible, but I have also seen first-hand how longer, descriptive URLs have performed really well.

You'll probably get different answers from different people, and I don't know that either is right or wrong. In my opinion the longer URL would be more beneficial, assuming that trail of URLs isn't going to continue on and get too long - /anniversary_flowers/dozen_roses/red/bouquet - you get the idea.

My reasoning behind going with the longer URL structure is because you get the benefit of having both potential keyword search terms, anniversary flowers & dozen roses, in the page URL. Hope that helps!