Is this a bad thing for SEO ?

Question

Hi folks,

a friend of mine told me that the company he works at are redoing their SEO for their large website. Large == both number of pages and traffic they get a day.

Currently they have a (quote) deeply nested site , which i'm assuming means /x/y/z/a/b/c.. or something. I also know it's very unRESTful from some of the pages i've also seen -> eg. foo.blah?a=1&b=2&c=3......z=24 (yep, lots of crap in the url).

So updating their SEO sounds like a much needed thing.

But, they are going flat. I mean -> totally flat. eg. /foo-bar-pew-pew-abc-article1

This scares the bollox out of me.

From what he said (if i understood him right), each - character doesn't mean a new heirachial level.

so /foo-bar-pew-pew-abc-article1 does not mean /foo/bar/pew/pew/abc/article1 A space could be replace by a -. A + represents a space, but only if the two words are suppose to be one word (whatever that means). ie. Jean-Luke will be jean+luke but if i had a subject like 'hello world, that would be listed ashello-world`.

Excuse me while i blow my head up.

Is this just mean or is it totally silly to go completly flat. To mean, I was under the impression that when SEO people say keep it as flat as possible, they are trying to say keep it to 1 or 2 levels. 4 is the utter max=.

Is this me or is a flat heirachy a 'really really good thing' for seo ... for MEDIUM and LARGE sites (lots of resources, not necessairly lots of hits/page views).

Answer 1

Well, let's take a step back and look at what SEO is supposed to accomplish: help a search engine identify quality, relevant content for users based on key phrases & terms.

Take, for example, the following blog URLs: * http://blog.example.com/articles/2010/01/20/how-to-improve-seo/ * http://blog.exmaple.com/how-to-improve-seo/

Yes, one is is deep & the other is flat. The URL structure is important for two reasons: 1. URL terms & phrases are high-value targets for determining relevance of a page by a search engine 2. A confusing URL may immediately force a user to skip your link in the search results

Let's face it. Google & others can associate the worst URLs with relevant content.

Search for "sears kenmore white refrigerator" in Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=sears+kenmore+white+refrigerator&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Notice the top hit? The URL is: http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_04665802000P , yet Google replaces the lousy URL with "www.sears.com › Refrigerators › Top Freezers". (Granted, 2 results down is the true URL).

If your goal for SEO is optimized organic relevance, then I would wholeheartedly recommend generating either key/value pairs in the url "www.sears.com/category/refrigerators/company/kenmore" (meh) or phrase-like URLs such as "www.sears.com/kenmore/refrigerators/modelNumber". You want to align your URLs with the user's search terms & phrases to maximize your effort.

In the end, if you offer valuable content & you structure your content and site properly, the search engines will accurately gather it. You just need to help them realize how specific and authoritative your content is :)