Replicating keywords in the URL - bad?

[CFSSEO]

Our site URL structure used to be (example site) frogsforsale.com/cute-frogs-for-sale/blue-frogs wherefrogsforsale.com/cute-frogs-for-sale/ was in front of every URL on the site.

We changed it by removing the for-sale part of the URL to be frogsforsale.com/cute-frogs/blue-frogs.

Would that have hurt our rankings and traffic by removing the for-sale?  Or was having for-sale in the URL twice (once in domain, again in URL) hurting our site?

The business wants to change the URLs again to put for-sale back in, but in a new spot such as frogsforsale.com/cute-frogs/blue-frogs-for-sale as they are convinced that is the cause of the rankings and traffic drop.  However the entire site was redesigned at the same time, the site architecture is very different, so it is very hard to say whether the traffic drop is due to this or not.

[MattAntonino]

I think you'd get more results from removing "frogs" so many times from the URL. We had a client doing this with insurance:

theirinsurancecompany.com.au/business-insurance/insurance-details.html

And it was a disaster. We changed all the URLs to types of insurance but without the word so:

theirinsurancecompany.com.au/business/insurance-details.html

And rankings improved dramatically over the next month or two as the URLs were recrawled and reindexed. Now they rank for all sorts of insurance related keyphrases with FEWER instances of insurance in each URL.

[DennisSeymour]

I dont think it's the cause for the drop (probably some other things caused by the redesign, like structural changes) nor do I think it will affect you negatively if you have for-sale in the URL or not.

Though it is still important, I would look at the Meta tags and page content more than the URL.

For me, the shorter url is my personal preference because of practical reasons.

IF that's what they really want to do, then you cant really do much about it.

Just bring it back and see what happens and adjust your strategy from there.