URL Structure Question

[94501]

Am starting to work with a new site that has a domain name contrived to help it with a certain kind of long tail search.

Just for fictional example sake, let's call it WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com.  The idea is that people might do searches for "what are the best restaurants in seattle" and over time they would make some organic search progress. Again, fictional top level domain example, but the real thing is just like that and designed to be cities in all states.

Here's the question, if you were targeting searches like the above and had that domain to work with, would you go with...

whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle-washington

whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/washington/seattle

whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle

whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/what-are-the-best-restaurants-in-seattle-wa

... or what and why?

Separate question (still need the above answered), would you rather go with a super short (4 letter), but meaningless domain name, and stick the longtail part after that?

I doubt I can win the argument the new domain name, so still need the first question answered.

The good news is it's pretty good content.

Thanks... Darcy

[Stramark]

take the new 4 letter domainname you can market and brand. Redirect the old domain as best and logical you can to the specific pages on the 4 letter domainname.

4 letters are much easy-er to market. usernames in twitter, facebook etc, and you can make xyxy seatle, xyxy newyork as branding or social handlers for local markets and stuf..

#marketing #branding #worlddomination

[94501]

Thanks for the answers Richard, Tobey & Lesley. Good points all.

Another option is to repurpose a domain name/one page site (used to be 1000 pages) that has been up for a long time, gained a bunch of authority/links for a totally unrelated subject, had a tragic developer experience where it's old content and could be used for this project. Currently it's a one page placeholder. That old TLD is equally meaningless to the new subject matter and could be anything.

So, if the choice were new 4 letter meaningless .com TLD or old meaningless 13 letter domain name with links for its old purpose and lots of old pages gone, which would you prefer? Is it hard to get Google to see an old domain name as a new subject... any harder than establishing relevance through content etc for a new domain name?

Thanks... Darcy

[Dezzign]

If it's a new domain then I definitely wouldn't go with anything like WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com. I would rather go with besteat.com or bestin.com and I could rank those domains much easier too. Don't start with a long spammy domain, build a brand instead. New domains with keywords help very little these days.

Most of the words in your domain examples are 'stop words' and shouldn't even be in domain names. (Words like 'are-best-in'). Even if you had categories for states they still don't belong in the final url either. Example, whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle should still resolve to whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle Although you could still visit whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/ when you click on seatttle the url should rewrite to whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle

For longevity, quality, branding, trust, and non spammy purposes, I would build the site using clean short urls like the below made up examples. EMD's are all but dead, especially long ones like whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com

tastyeat.com/seattle/
bestin.com/seattle/
tastytown.com/seattle/
dinein.com/seattle/

[T0BY]

Personally, I would go for something much shorter. Long domain names can appear spammy, and I believe are one of the spam metrics used by Moz in their spam score. The other problem with a long domain name is that pages and posts on your site may have titles which will be much too long to fit in a search engines search window, although you may be able to tweak this.  You may well be better off having a very short domain name so that as new keywords come through which you want to target you can do this effectively without having too long a URL.

[LesleyPaone]

I would prefer this one, whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle  It keeps the state ISO in the url for when you grow large enough that you start running into cities with multiple names. Plus people are lazy, they abbreviate states and I think that helps with using that url structure as well.