Stripping Parent Pages from Slugs

[ZeroGrav]

Hi

Basically my wordpress site exists of 4 Parent Categories, each of them having + 50 subpages (or child pages) in them. Some of these child pages have other child pages in them. This creates URL's (or slugs) looking like this:

mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops

I found a plugin that 301 redirects a page to any given url. This way i can make www.mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops redirect to mydomain.com/new-york-seed-shops, only with the purpose to have shorter links and the keyword appearing 'earlier' in the url.

Another option to shorten the url's is to shorten the parent pages slugs, something like this: mydomain.com/seeds/exotic/new-york. Only downside is that the keyword for the parent pages themselves won't appear in the slug anymore. The keywords will still be there in the Title, Description and H1 tag, but not in the url. so if my keyword is stunflower seeds, instead of having www.mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds i'll have www.mydomain.com/seeds

What would you do?

1: Leave urls like this - really long urls, keywords don't come 'early' in url
mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops

2: Make child pages 301 redirect - short urls, but url structure is lost (parent pages don't show in the url)mydomain.com/new-york-seed-shop3: User shorter slugs for Parent Pages - to me looks like the best option, but then i'll loose my keywords in the slugs for parent pages.mydomain.com/seeds/exotic/new-york4: Yes there's even a 4th option, again the example of how my slugs look now:

mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops

I could use the plugin to redirect every child page (for example new-york-seed-shops) to this: mydomain.com/seeds/exotic/new-york-seed-shops. But i don't know if it's okay to redirect to different parent pages with wordpress...I'd also like to know if backlinks to 301 redirect pages count for the page they redirect to. And if they have the same impact/strength as links that link directly to the page.Thanks in advance

[G-Force]

Hi Freek,

Here are my thoughts :

1 : Might look like a spammy keyword stuffed url to users and search engines

2 : Short and sweet, you do lose the idea of parent/child relation, but I think it's the most clean and optimized one (as long as you keep it short)

3 : Less descriptive, but looks less keyword optimized and might help to get breadcrumbs because of the parent/child relation.

4 : Not that I can think of, you might want to try both, number 2 and 3 on a certain part of your website, track your rankings and see wich ones goes up and wich ones stays the same or decrease. Then you should be able to decide wich one is the best.

Also, don't forget to ask website's customer what they think would be the best URLs, their opinion also counts!

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.