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  4. URL Stucture: Folders or hyphens?

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URL Stucture: Folders or hyphens?

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  • Eteach_Marketing
    Eteach_Marketing last edited by Mar 13, 2013, 2:00 PM

    Hi guys,

    I've been reading through other similar asked questions regarding this but I can't seem to find the answer I need....

    I'm having a discussion with my director regarding what would be more  SEO friendly for a new page/URL we are creating.

    Is using folders or hyphens better?

    The new page is question would be something along the lines of either:

    (home page) www.eteach.com/utc

    (about us page)--> www.eteach.com/utc/about

    (talent pool page)---->www.eteach.com/utc/talent-pools

    Using the folder structure here will always show the user that they are on the UTC pages, then shows them what pages they are on int he UTC site.

    OR!

    (home page) www.eteach.com/careers-at-utc

    (about us page)--->www.eteach.com/about-utc

    (talent pool page) -----> www.eteach.com/talent-pools-at-utcs

    which doesn't make it as clear to the user, but is this way more SEO friendly?

    Can anybody make a good argument for and against folder structure vs hyphens?

    Thanks,

    Virginia

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Cyrus-Shepard
      Cyrus-Shepard last edited by Mar 15, 2013, 3:17 AM Mar 15, 2013, 3:17 AM

      Hi Virginia!

      My personal opinion and experience are that although keywords in the URL may have a minor place in Google's ranking algorithms (sometimes to a negative effect in the case of over-optimization) both keywords and URL structure have a far greater impact on user experience and click-through rate.

      A couple of studies (here's one) have shown slightly negative correlations between higher rankings and both the length of the url and number of hyphens. In other words, _shorter URLs with less hyphens tend to perform slightly better in search results. _

      On the other hand, URLs with keywords in them tend to get higher click through rates. 🙂

      There's also a couple of schools of thoughts about subdirectories vs. "flat" architecture. Some would argue that subdirectories give your content semantic structure, (i.e. everything in the utc folder could be related to one another) while others argue that a "flat" architecture with fewer folders can lead to better crawling (although I've never seen any sold evidence of this.

      Regardless, I don't believe there's one right answer.... it's best to experiment and use your best judgement as to what will lead to the best user experience.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Cyrus-Shepard
        Cyrus-Shepard @irvingw last edited by Mar 15, 2013, 3:07 AM Mar 15, 2013, 3:07 AM

        Hi Irving...

        Really interested in your answer here, because I haven't heard this before. My understanding has always been that it doesn't make much of a difference, mostly based on comments Matt Cutts made in this 2010 Webmaster Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=971qGsTPs8M

        That said, I may be out of date on the subject. I'm sure there might be correlation data out there I'm not aware of. Any thoughts you can share on the subject would be greatly appreciated!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • TextMarketing
          TextMarketing last edited by Mar 13, 2013, 3:15 PM Mar 13, 2013, 3:15 PM

          You should be using hyphens.

          Google treats underscores as word joiners, while it treats hyphens as word separators. In other words the hyphen is like having a space between the words and tells Google and that they should be treated as two separate words.

          Matt Cutts explains it in more detail in this video...

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AQcSFsQyct8

          Hope this helps!

          • Matt
          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • irvingw
            irvingw last edited by Mar 13, 2013, 2:40 PM Mar 13, 2013, 2:13 PM

            The most important thing to remember is that keywords in folders do not help push rank, keywords in filenames do.

            So if you want a folder named /utc/ because it makes the site structure more logical than do it, but understand that it's not helping rank for "utc"

            Therefore, in my opinion this is best

            www.eteach.com/talent-pools-at-utc

            this is acceptable

            www.eteach.com/utc//talent-pools-at-utc

            this doesn't target "utc" for SEO

            www.eteach.com/utc/talent-pools

            and hyphens are better than one word or underscores

            Cyrus-Shepard 1 Reply Last reply Mar 15, 2013, 3:07 AM Reply Quote 2
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