URL Impact on SEO Rankings in 2020

[zara]

Hi, I have a question regarding SEO rankings with URL’s. My understanding is URL’s have minimal influence on rankings on Google, correct? I have sites with hundreds of articles and while they’re organized in-site for viewer navigation, they aren’t in their URL’s. Which means, all my URL’s are like this:

www.domain.com/article-name

However, if I were to implement categories for all my articles, would it help my rankings? Or hurt them (shorter URL’s generally do better than longer ones)? For example, I can do this:

www.domain.com/category/article-name

Which of the two URL’s will be better for SEO rankings purely from Google’s POV? Or there will be no difference? Thanks!

[sunjun]

google has point that url impact minimal, after be indexed, lower and lower . That is what they say，just keep the Describval url

[FranticFish]

I posted something related to this recently - [webmasterworld.com...] - as a direct factor, I saw no noticeable effect. As sunjun says (and others remarked in that thread) this matches what Google have said.

However, if people link to your articles using the url then then text in the url becomes a factor in external anchor text weighting.
Plus, if you use the category names for internal navigation (including breadcrumb) then they become a factor in internal ('on-page') anchor text weighting

I would consider them as having possible value as an indirect ranking factor.

[RedBar]

If you want to know how to do it then look at the successful spammers in your widget sector.

Scrapers usually only copy successful sites for the same reason as above.

[saladtosser]

Don't know if this is helpful to anyone but I have a lot of "test" sites, I took one "test" site that was ranking 8th/10th for a specific keyword (for a good 16 months stable) because it was ranking 8/10th it had next to no traffic! Anyway I brought a load of fivver links to it and a month later it tanked to page 3 which confirms to me google doesn't ignore backlinks as JM says, they still penalise against them. I haven't tested this against another sight (competitor), morally I can't even if they are a competitor, I would HOPE it's not that easy to take someone down! (this was a small local site that doesn't have a backlink profile like a big site). So negative SEO 100% works against my own site, is google smarter enough to know it was my site in the first place though? (I asked a friend to build login to fivver and buy the backlinks)