Keyword stuffing in URL? Ekk. Help Please.

[hpeisach]

Okay, so I work as content manager in the travel industry and we're re-doing our site, pretty much from scratch, including the SEO, anchor text/route url, etc. I am struggling with one particular thing. If all my url's have similar keywords, ie example.com/atlanta-trip and example.com/boston-trip and so on and so forth for every destination, will using "trip" in the url be seen by Google as keyword stuffing? Should I make my url's more diverse?

My gut feeling is no based on all the Moz, Google and other SEO research I've done, because it's all relevant to the content and the user experience, but I'd like to be sure, since we really can't afford to get penalized by Google...again.

[AndreVanKets]

Agreed,

As long as each of the location pages are unique but all contain the word "trip" you'll be fine.

Have you considered taking it a step further and researching what people search most for each location?

Example:

Atlanta Trip vs Atlanta Tours vs Atlanta Holiday vs Atlanta Vacation etc.

Obviously it would need to match the intent of the page, but you could further improve the page by matching what people search for most for each location in the URL and Title. (If "trip" is a common term for all locations, then use this across them all)

Greg

[johnny122]

Same feeling than Ron. I would care more about title and page stuffing. Checking the top 10 results and what they are doing can help you to decide.

[Ron_McCabe]

Harry,

My guiding principle on all this type of thing is will this provide a better experience for end users.  In my opinion your URL set up would as it logically lets people find what they are looking for.  I would just make sure the navigation for the site takes advantage of this set up and gets users where they need to go.  So I do not believe this URL structure would hurt you.  it might actually help you as long as the content is relevant to the URL, meta description and tags.

Ron