Newbie needs some help. Let's say I wanted to optimize a page for "blended sheep smoothie drinks" If had to created a page AND a subpage with the url... domain/blended-sheep/smoothie-drinks.html do I still get maximum SEO benefit for the URL.. or do I have to rework the page order and get rid of the nested page? thanks
Not true. You can't make blanket statements like that and expect them to be true all of the time. As with 95% of the questions asked here, it depends on the situation. I think it's total BS to believe that domain/blended-sheep-smoothie-drinks.html will somehow rank any better than domain/blended-sheep/smoothie-drinks.html I'll tell you several reasons why I think that... First of all, Google more than likely normalizes the URL by replacing all of the special characters like ':', '/', '.', '-', and '_' in the URL with spaces before evaluating them for keywords. At that point, the URLs are going to look the same. Have you paid attention to Google WMT and the Dashboard -> Statistics -> What Googlebot Sees -> In External Links to Your Site when someone links to you with a link text of "http://www.example.com/folder-name/page-name.html"? It shows up as "http www example com folder name page name html". This is more than likely the same way they are normalizing your URLs before evaluating them for keywords. Secondly, like they do with the content on the page, like they do with your <title>, like they do with header elements like <h1>, etc. Google is likely looking at the keyword density within the URL. NOTE: The keyword density within the above 2 URLs are identical. Thirdly... Do you really think Google expects everyone on the web to put every page on their site in the root folder. It's a TERRIBLE site information architecture. Do you really think they would penalize someone for having a good, logical, well thought out, hierarchical information architecture? I'm quite sure that Google EXPECTS webmasters to structure their site in some hierarchical folder structure and would not count that against you. Where having 'many' folders in a URL (like 5, 6, 7, or more folders) can hurt you from an SEO perspective is mostly from a crawlability perspective. The more links away from the home page a page is, the less likely it will get indexed unless you have deep links or use a sitemap with that URL 7 levels deep having a higher priority than pages closer to the root. The keyword density within the URL will also be reduced... But who cares really. Having keywords in your URL is just one of the 200+ ranking factors at Google and is a VERY minor ranking factor. If you're trying to decide whether to use domain/blended-sheep-smoothie-drinks.html or domain/blended-sheep/smoothie-drinks.html it should be based on what is the best information architecture for your site... mainly on whether you have other pages that are also about 'blended sheep'. If the "blended sheep smoothie drinks" page is the only "blended sheep" related page then use: domain/blended-sheep-smoothie-drinks.html However if you have multiple "blended sheep" related pages (smoothie drinks, sandwiches, appetizers, tshirts, etc.) and also want to have a page dedicated to the general topic of "blended sheep" then it makes 110% sense to structure your URLs like: domain/blended-sheep/ (page about blended sheep w/ link to more specific child pages about blended sheep) domain/blended-sheep/smoothie-drinks.html domain/blended-sheep/sandwiches.html domain/blended-sheep/appetizers.html domain/blended-sheep/tshirts.html and you can do so without fear of damaging the 1% or whatever effect that keyword rich URLs have on your rankings. In fact, if you know anything about Theme Pyramids and siloing, having an information architecture like this can actually HELP your rankings... I highly recommend these types of URLs. Just don't spam them repeatedly with the same keywords. I, would, however suggest NEVER using a URL like domain/folder-name/page-name.html if you are NOT going to have a page live at domain/folder-name/. Don't just stuff folder names (w/ no corresponding pages) into a URL to get keywords there. A lot of people will chop off "page-name.html" expecting to navigate up a level to a more general page about the same topic. Getting a 404 in this case is a terrible user experience. Even if you 301 redirect domain/folder-name/ to the domain/ it's just dumb IMO.