Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
For ranking purposes, is it better to place keywords in a URL folder or in the filename itself (i.e. www.example.com/keyword/page.html or www.example.com/keyword.html)? Does Google treat these differently than Yahoo, MSN or others? In my experience and tests, I have not seen a difference between these, but I wonder what you have seen.
Obviously thing such as internal link structure, content, inbound links, etc. all play into the ranking, but assuming all else is the same, does placement of the keyword matter or is it simply a style preference?
However, planning URL structure is a vital task in the creation or maintenance of any website.
The implication of using a folder is that it will contain a collection of related documents, most likely because the folder name reflects some kind of categorisation system - as good URLs do. Remember that URLs are part of the "interface" to your site and should be as user-friendly and as permanent as possible.
If you base your choice of URLs on those kind of criteria, they'll work best for Google too.
I am not trying to do anything beyond white hat SEO here (please point out if this starts to approach grey/black hat arenas). We have a large number of pages our our site and on some ecommerce sites the pages are all dynamic php pages which search engines do not weight as heavily as their static friends. The point is that the file locations on our server(s) might not be what is actually displayed in the URL. We are planning to handle redirects in a way that will help things seem better organized and more useable to visitors.
www.example.com/widgets/
www.example.com/widgets/maintenance/
www.example.com/widgets/maintenance/repairs
"repairs" is an example filename (note the absence of trailing slash). Categories that contain (or may contain) several documents are represented as directories (with a trailing slash). The user can work backwards through the URL structure if desired.
I drop the file extensions for filenames since they are not a necessary component of a URL and harm permanence, since they tend to reflect technology, rather than anything useful to a user - even .htm assumes that the URL will always deliver html content, which will not necessarily the case.
the pages are all dynamic php pages which search engines do not weight as heavily as their static friends
Unless the URLs are problematic (e.g. if they create potential for duplication, or are over-long) then you're unlikely to see great search engine benefit from a static vs dynamic URL, although the usability benefits of a planned URL structure are clear and compelling IMO.
the file locations on our server(s) might not be what is actually displayed in the URL
This is fine, and a best practice approach. Your file structure is how you organise your site internally, the URLs are how you present your website to a user.
URL folder or in the filename itself (i.e. example.com/keyword/page.html or example.com/keyword.html)?
I like folders because they're scaleable. Google likes full folders on my sites. I find I need a bunch of files (30+) in a folder to give its keyword decent ranking value. (Of course always linking back to the index plus the index of the previous folder.)
keyword1/
keyword1/keyword2/
p/g
