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Hi

Basically my wordpress site exists of 4 Parent Categories, each of them having + 50 subpages (or child pages) in them. Some of these child pages have other child pages in them. This creates URL's (or slugs) looking like this:

mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops

I found a plugin that 301 redirects a page to any given url. This way i can make www.mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops redirect to mydomain.com/new-york-seed-shops, only with the purpose to have shorter links and the keyword appearing 'earlier' in the url.

Another option to shorten the url's is to shorten the parent pages slugs, something like this: mydomain.com/seeds/exotic/new-york. Only downside is that the keyword for the parent pages themselves won't appear in the slug anymore. The keywords will still be there in the Title, Description and H1 tag, but not in the url. so if my keyword is stunflower seeds, instead of having www.mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds i'll have www.mydomain.com/seeds

What would you do?

1: Leave urls like this - really long urls, keywords don't come 'early' in url
mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops

2: Make child pages 301 redirect - short urls, but url structure is lost (parent pages don't show in the url)mydomain.com/new-york-seed-shop3: User shorter slugs for Parent Pages - to me looks like the best option, but then i'll loose my keywords in the slugs for parent pages.mydomain.com/seeds/exotic/new-york4: Yes there's even a 4th option, again the example of how my slugs look now:

mydomain.com/sunflower-seeds/exotic-sunflower-seeds/new-york-seed-shops

I could use the plugin to redirect every child page (for example new-york-seed-shops) to this: mydomain.com/seeds/exotic/new-york-seed-shops. But i don't know if it's okay to redirect to different parent pages with wordpress...I'd also like to know if backlinks to 301 redirect pages count for the page they redirect to. And if they have the same impact/strength as links that link directly to the page.Thanks in advance

Thanks for the detailed answer David. I do agree with you that in the long term, an EMD could tie you down to that particular keyword. If my main keyword is Acoustic Guitar Review and i buy acousticguitarreviews.com, i can't cover electric guitar reviews, because my domain name doesn't imply so...

I do hope google weighs down the importance of EMD's in the future, as some spammers use it to their advantage. I've heard people say they ranked for reasonably competitive keywords with just a domain that had a fresh wordpress install on it with only one article and and some backlinks...

I'm building a site on a virtual host and now it's ready to go online, but i still have to choose a domain name.

One of the main keywords i want to rank for is a 3-word keyword phrase with 9000+ exact match searches per month. Here's an example to better understand my question: 'Guitar training lessons'

My main competitor's domain is only 5 months old but it does have the full keyword phrase in it with  '4u' added at the end:  www.guitartraininglessons4u.com

I wanted to go with www.guitartrainingcenter.com (notice that 'lessons' is left out of the domain name) but i'm wondering if my main competitor would have a big advantage by having the full keyword phrase in his domain.

How much weight does google give to sites that have the exact search query in their domain name? Does a domain still qualify as 'exact match' if a word (info) is added to it? How much harder would it be to outrank this domain as apposed to a site that doesn't have the keywords in its domain name?

Thanks in advance

Freek