Directory Name or Page Name

[frozenpeas]

Wondering what others thought regarding directories and page names and which they thought was better from a SEO point of view:

a) www.domain.com/keyword/index.html
b) www.domain.com/dir/keyword.html
c) www.domain.com/keyword/keyword.html

In this instance I cannot have:
www.domain.com/keyword.html

Vote Now

[olgerdviz]

c) looks a bit spammy
b) is better than a) in terms that it is more focused on the page itself.
So my choice would be b)

[frozenpeas]

Results so far:

b) 100%

:)

[le_gber]

perso I'd go for a but with a twist :)

a) www.domain.com/keyword/

[frozenpeas]

Maybe we should add:
d) www.domain.com/keyword/

Nice one le_gber

Not a fan of this method myself.

[le_gber]

frozenpeas, have a look at dmoz URL's ;)

[frozenpeas]

"Yes I know that" as my 4 year old would say :)

Maybe if it was an e-commerce site with 200 categories and sub-categories how would it fair then?

Surely products under the same category should come under the same directory?

e.g.
www.domain.com/spanners/ (would list all spanners)
www.domain.com/spanners/metal-spanners.html (would be a product detail page)

and not

www.domain.com/spanners/ (would list all spanners)
www.domain.com/spanners/metal-spanners/

which leads to

www.domain.com/spanners/metal-spanners/4-inch-spanner.html

or

www.domain.com/spanners/metal-spanners/adjustable/4-inch-spanner.html

Long URLS?

Just noted that the following are not in Google and their robots does not ban them:

[dmoz.org...]
or
[dmoz.org...]
or
[dmoz.org...]

Confused? Iam.

[le_gber]

try google site:dmoz.org/business/Biotechnology_and_Pharmaceuticals/ - it shows the first one you mentionned.

Altough I think the assoc page might be new - Goolge PR1 from a PR6 page(?)

In your case though I think you are right.

www.sitedomain.com/category/sub-category/product-name.htm

where sub category is a real one not just for keywords.

[frozenpeas]

Yep - that must be it with regards to the Associations dir and DMOZ (Interesting to note DMOZ using underscores as opposed to hyphens, but thats another thread in itself I would imagine)

To me its all about organising data.
If you had a bunch of images on your computer you would arrange them as Main cat/subcat/sub-sub-cat etc so you could locate them easily.

Websites make more sense to their creators if they are arranged in this format.

Unfortunately, it appears that search engines smack us if we even attempt this or punish the site if the path is too long.

If Google was a bloke I would....