ASP.NET MVC - Shortening urls

Question

I am developing an international web site - multiple countries, multiple languages. I am trying to create SEO friendly URLs.

For example the catalog consists of cartesian product Regions x Categories. A typical catalog url has 7 levels of hierarchy:

www.site.com/en/Catalog/Browse/10/28/London/Category1

The route format is as follows:

"/{culture}/{controller}/{action}/{regionId}/{branchId}/{region}/{branch}"

I have read somewhere that search engines give less relevance to pages deep in the site hierarchy (determined by number of slashes in path). Is this true? Does anybody have info on how much relevance do deep sites lose?

I have thought about simplifying the URLs (making them less deep) by using '-' and '+' as delimiters, so now I have routes like for example:

"/{culture}/friendlyActionPlusControllerName/{regionId}-{branchId}/{region}+{branch}"

ending up with urls still 4 levels deep in "folder" hierarchy.

www.site.com/en/services/10-28/London+Category1

Is using + and - in URLs considered a viable approach? Does this kind of shortening help in SEO? Does anyone see any options for me how to further simplify the URLs?

Additional note: Catalog is going to be the main source of search engine traffic. There are going to be a few content pages as well (with urls like www.site.com/en/Service1) but these two are going to be the only search traffic generators, so I would like to have them optimized as much as possible.

Answer 1

From my experience, I suggest you use the - (hyphenated). If you can keep the number of hyphens to 2 or 3, that is probably the safe route to take. Although I have seen people who go beyond that and it works just as well.

Basically I think if you do it in a way that is purely descriptive of the page content without going overboard, you're okay. However it should also be noted that the more keywords in your url's then the more diverse your page is going to be for Search Engines.

Also remember that keywords in the title, h1, meta data should all match up so the more you have the more difficult this is to manage.

I realise that this does not answer your question 100% and leads to more questions!

Answer 2

There is an open source project that implements shortening URL in aspnet mvc on codeplex, you can get it here: http://miniurl.codeplex.com/