Folders or no folders in url?

[bellezze]

What's best for SEO: a folder or no folder?

For example: https://domain.com/arizona-dentist/somecontent or just https://domain.com/somecontent.

The website has 100+ pages with "dentist" within the content of the somecontent pages, as well as specific pages for /arizona-dentist/. Also, the breadcrumb for the somecontent page would appear something like follows: Arizona Dentist > Some Content ... you can find the somecontent page from the Arizona Dentist page.

I didn't include folders in the path because I did not want the url to be too long. In terms of where it is showing up on google search results...it is within the top 3-4 on the first page when searching Arizona dentist come content.

The website is pretty organized even without subfolders because it was made using Umbraco.

I am wondering if using folders will increase the SEO ranking, or if it really doesn't and could hurt it if paths become too long; especially since it's not doing too bad in the search ranking right now.

-Thanks in advance for any help.

[MrWhippy]

No problem,

I have just been going through the links and the consensus seems to be that it is best to leave alone.

So yes I would leave it alone, but keep in mind for future sites as keywords in URLs are a ranking factor but only a small one. I haven't found anything that does an analysis of keyword in URL versus short URL for mobile which would be interesting.

Thanks for your patience whilst we sorted that out.

[bellezze]

Thank you very much! I will look at those links.

I think your last line sums everything up! It might be best to leave things as is right now, since the site won't grow that much larger for the time being (not that I am aware of anyway).

[MrWhippy]

Have you done an analysis to see if there is any difference in mobile and desktop? I ask as the main reason for shorter URLs is to make them mobile friendly as far as i am aware.

I think as long as you are consistent across all of your URL structures and the information and pages are in an organised manner then you will be OK.

I am not totally convinced that removing the lawyer from the URL would have much of a negative or positive impact on the results you are seeing. Unfortunately without testing fully there is no way to know. And I wouldn't want to test something like this on a production site that is starting to see traffic.

Side note: it is good practice having the keyword in the URL where it naturally makes sense

Also another consideration is do you plan on adding a lot more pages in the future? if you do then you need to consider the benefits of organising the site now before you add those pages against leaving as is.

I am not that familiar with Umbraco unfortunately.

---

I have done some more digging and found some more pages that may help.

https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/search-engine-friendly-urls/

https://www.searchlaboratory.com/2016/02/do-keywords-in-urls-still-have-an-impact-on-rankings-experiment/

https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls

https://moz.com/learn/seo/url

I know i seem to be sitting on the fence here, I am not really sure which is the best way to move forward.

If you are planning on adding lots more pages or categories then i would seriously consider tidying the URLs up with 301 redirects to save on work in the future.(again this needs considering against the potential affects on SERPS and traffic)

If you are not planning on adding lots more pages then I would leave as is.

[bellezze]

Thank you for your responses!

It does help! The site has been around for ~1 year and within the last 6 months has been doing well but could do better.

So you would leave out "law" or "lawyer" in the folders (eg: /business/commercial-contracts instead of /business-law(yer)/commercial-contracts). This would require changing the category pages to remove "lawyer" (eg: /business-lawyer/ page would now become /business/); the 301 redirects are not a problem with Umbraco.

So it is a question of whether changing the /business-lawyer/ page to remove lawyer, and then organizing each page (some-content) inside the appropriate categories (i.e. /business/some-content) would help or hurt the site. Right now the /business-lawyer/ page is doing quite well, so changing the page to remove "lawyer" would need to be offset by adding more content referring to lawyers within the page, and this might not guarantee the same link juice. However, by organizing the some-content pages inside the various categories those pages might increase.

I guess there is no way of knowing without doing it, but the risk of losing the juice for /business-lawyer/ might outweigh any POTENTIAL benefit of adding the some-content to each category (/business/some-content), which based alone on the url path might not help SEO given the fact that "business" is just 1 of 3 keywords typed into google ("business lawyer [the target area]"). I think I might just leave it alone without adding some-content to each category, but instead keeping the url path short and some-content directly after the domain.

What are your thoughts based on this rationale? Again, I really do appreciate your help!

[MrWhippy]

Thanks for sharing the link and extra info that has cleared things up greatly for me.

Having looked at the site(nice site by the way) I would say your question now depends on how old the site is and how well each page is currently doing.

If i was to make a site like that from the start i would use the categories you have used under practice areas to separate the content into different areas. I would probably avoid using law in each category however i don't think it will make to much difference.

If the site has been around for a while then i would leave as is unless you want to go to the effort of 301 the pages to the new URL's. it might be a good idea to 301 the old URLS if google has already indexed some of the pages even if it is a new site.

Looking at the site you have 6 referring domains so either option is open to you, it depends on the timescale you have to do it.

Remember though a nicely organised site that is well categorised with good internal linking, will help your users and the search engines navigate the site and understand the topic of the page.

If you do it, I would use your favourite crawl bot to make sure that there are no broken URLS.

Does this help?

[bellezze]

This post is deleted!

[MrWhippy]

No problem, I am sure we can come to a sensible resolution.

If all of your site is related to dentist then I think I would leave that out of the folder names and use the other terms like cavity or root-canal as the folder names.

If however your site is about various different services in different cities then you have a few options.

Possible folder and URL structures.

1. somedomain/cavity/somecontent
2. somedomain/city/cavity/somecontent
3. somedomain/somecontent
4. somedomain/city/dentist/cavity/somecontent
5. somedomain/dentist/city/cavity/somecontent
6. somedomain/dentist/cavity/somecontent

There are pros and cons to each of the above and it really depends on where your site breaks down into different offerings of content.

If your site is all about dentists and you have different content for each city then option 2 is probably good as it will help visitors and search engines see they are in the right place.

if you have different services and the content for each city is different then option 5 may work.

The big question is how and where you differentiate your content. There are loads of options but the main thing is to make sure it is consistent and that you are not duplicating content across pages. The duplication of content also means you are not using the same content rehashed with different city names in it. (sorry if i am teaching you to suck eggs).

To be able to give a more detailed answer i would need to have a look at the site or for you to provide more detail or examples.

I am though more than happy to help as best i can.

I have just been looking for sites that may have similar issues but cant find any, can you share what the site does in more detail without giving away information you do not want to share?

[bellezze]

Thank you for your reply. That is very detailed.

Perhaps I didn't give the greatest example. Instead of Arizona-dentist being the folder, perhaps a specific 'city'-dentist as the main folder. The target audience is people looking for a dentist within that specific city.

I am worried about keyword stuffing...because the main folder pages would all have the word "dentist" in them...so for example: 'city'-dentist/somecontent would be one folder and page; another folder would be /cavity-dentist/somecontent2; another would be /root-canal-dentist/somecontent3; etc.

It's very complicated to weigh up the pros and cons, and actually arrive at a logical conclusion.

[MrWhippy]

Hi Bellezze,

For me the answer is that it depends.

That is if it makes sense to structure your website into categories then use the subfolders. It sound like you have a fair number of pages, therefore using the folders in the URL may help both your users understand where they are and the search engines to put your pages into the relevant categories.

That is to use your example:

https://domain.com/arizona-dentist/somecontent or just https://domain.com/somecontent.

The first link helps to put the content into the category of Arizona dentist the 2nd link just shows the content.

So if you were to have

https://domain.com/michigan-dentist/somecontent

https://domain.com/ohiio-dentist/somecontent

Then i think it would make sense to use the folders, just make sure that the content isn't duplicated for each category.

However if there is no difference in each state (using your example) then i would either look to use just dentist as the folder or to leave out the folders completely.

Remember you can use keywords as the folders, as long as you are not stuffing keywords in there.

This link may also be useful.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-friendly-url-structure-2/202790/

I hope this helps.