URL Stucture: Folders or hyphens?

[Eteach_Marketing]

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

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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!

[TextMarketing]

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

[irvingw]

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