URL Length or Exact Breadcrumb Navigation URL? What's More Important

[Romancing]

Basically my question is as follows, what's better:

www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs).

or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain).

In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same.

To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure?

Please advise,

Shawn

[grayloon]

The question is a great one, and the responses to it are also great, but they directly contradict each other! Could the SEOMoz staff weigh in on this one?

[saibose]

Shwan,

I have noticed that when you have a long URL structure with multiple folders, Google tends to lose "interest" in your deep pages.

Let me give you an example: If you have a domain called www.website.com and you have a category called gemstones. In gemstones, you have diamond as a subcategory and a solitaire as a page.

If you consider your homepage to have an importance of 1, you would not have a category page which also has an importance of greater than or equal to 1. So, your category page gets a page weight value...lets say 0.9. Now, your subcategory page is treated that same way and you give it a page weight of say 0.8. Now, your solitaire page gets a value less than 0.8. Now, if you cut out one or more levels in your URL, you have a better chance of assigning of a higher value to your page.

Now, coming to your question. Breadcrumbs are essentially meant to help your users navigate better. So, your website hiearchy (the folders, sub folders or categories, sub categories) should reflect in your breadcrumb.

So, keep your URLs short, but keep your breadcrumbs like your website flow.

[fabioricotta-84038]

In my experience, Google does not ranking lower longer URLs. I know Rand published once a correlation study that shows this, but I can show you many examples that I've used the first approach and got good rankings. Same for the second approach.

I think you should keep your website architecture solid, following the correct path and not removing one level.

Another thing is that dropping that specific level may cause you some duplicate URLs problem. You will need some database check before enable each URLs. Pay attention if you choose the second approach.

[AlanMosley]

The url
length should not be ridiculously long, I think 255 chars in the safe limit.

So long as
you keep in that it’s ok, but if you have a long bread crumb trail, your page
is probably many clicks from the home page also and this is bad.

Many people
think that the problem is having pages deep in the folder structure, but it is
not, it is the amount of clicks from the home page that is the problem