SEO URL Structure

Question

Something that I do not see much and wonder if any SEO guru knows the best approach that will not hurt SEO.

URL Examples, which one is best?

http://www.example.com/widgets/partnumber/widget-001

or

http://www.example.com/widgets/widget-001/partnumber

Answer 1

I don't think it'll effect your search engine results at all, but the hierarchy of the top makes more sense (assuming that "widget-001" is a part number. It's typically nicer to go broad > specific from right to left. I'd recommend:

widgets/widget-name/parts/part-number

e.g.

widgets/super-widget/parts/super-widget-gear

Answer 2

It shouldn't make too much difference, but you might consider combining the widget name and its part number into something like:

http://example.com/widgets/name-partnumber

Unless each widget has more than more part number, each with its own page, in which case it'd make sense to keep the widget/partnumber directory hierarchy.

The Google SEO Starter Guide has a section on good practices for URL structure:

Use words in URLs - URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them.

Avoid:

• using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
• choosing generic page names like "page1.html"
• using excessive keywords like "baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.htm"

Answer 3

Search engines tend to treat slashes and dashes as word separating characters, so if they stumbled upon the URLs as visible text (possibly the only instance in which keywords in the URL matter) the two may look like:

http www example com widgets partnumber widget 001

and

http www example com widgets widget 001 partnumber

Therefore, these are very similar to each other, and given the amount that a search engine cares about keywords in a URL (probably almost never) it may not make any difference.

• The 001 is probably meaningless to a search index, unless users actually know your widget by its number and are likely to search for that number. Otherwise, it would be far better to give it a descriptive name than have a number. Consider that 'how to build a shed' is much better than 'article 001'. If it would be at all possible to identify your parts by a name on the URL instead of a number (this doesn't mean they can't still have a number shown somewhere) that would be good.
• The word partnumber appears to be unnecessary - presumably you could make the application so that if it saw widgets/widget-001 it would realise that the second part is the partnumber.

Note

• You were right to use dashes rather than underscores in your examples. Search indexes tend to treat underscores as combining characters rather than word separators, so they may treat foo_bar as a single word.

Answer 4

1. Do not repeat "widget".
2. Product number will not help. See how SO appends the post description after it's id to enhance it's SEO:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/621380/seo-url-structure

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/621380/whatever

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/621380/

Answer 5

Despite the near-ubiquitous use of rewrites, search engines still think in terms of directory structure.

So all other things being equal, in example.com/term1/term2/term3 a SE will credit term1 > term2 > term3 just like they'll credit earlier words in a title or h1 tag slightly more. But this difference is trivial.

The bigger issue is that if you have loads of these pages, you may have difficulty getting google to put the deeper pages in the primary index unless you have external link juice flowing to those sites, or are already a very well-established authority site with tons of internal juice.

So, aside from the good suggestions already mentioned, I would add the following:

1. 10% of your pages probably translate into 90% of your profit. Flatten your url structure by adding a "best-sellers"/"most-popular" sidebar or similar so that your link architecture drives the pages you care about to the top of the index. Getting every page in the index sounds nice, but what you really care about is getting your top converting pages ranked highly.

2. Although changes in google's handling of nofollows make pagerank sculpting nearly useless, you can still use noindex and nofollow to your advantage, especially if you have issues with pagination or midlevel category pages, for example. Rank Fishkin talks about this at 12:02 on this SEOMoz video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-give-it-up

3. If possible, make your urls hackable and 301 redirect them to the proper page (which includes a rel canonical). That way if (read: when) you have to redesign your url architecture, you won't lose visitors or links to 404s and in the meantime, anyone trying to type in blue super widgets will get where they want to go.

Hope that helps.