best page url structure

Hi, I wonder which url structure is best:

www.somesite.com/articlewhatever/
www.somesite.com/articlewhatever
www.somesite.com/articlewhatever.php / html whatever

what do u think? is there any real difference for ranking?

 

I think most people do www.somesite.com/article-whatever.php with a dash between keywords

 

i think is the third—www.somesite.com/articlewhatever.php
ps: if www.somesite.com/articlewhatever.html is better!

 

so my structure right now isn't good?

http://www.sandrophoto.com/2007/11/18/goodbye-blue-sky/

oh I got indexed, I even got some ranking... I don't want to change it now what are my options?

 

Iv tried practically every way and it doesnt seem to make a difference. Even when i had www.mydomain.com?test=yes...Instead of www.mydomain.com/test/yes, the one with the obvious variables seemed to do just as well on Google as the second one.

 

Sandrodz...your only option to keep the rankings is to perform to do a 301 redirect to the new url. (be sure to link to the new url...don't link to the old url)

I also think www.somesite.com/articlewhatever.html would be best...unless you plan to group/categorize articles... which case www.somesite.com/category/articlewhatever.html would be best. If you do use dashes...minimize the usage...not more than 2 in any url.

 

Try this one
http://www.saversites.com/x4_seo_guide_urls.php

hope it can help

 

I have question too : 1) articlecategory.mydomain.com/article 2)mydomain.com/articlecategory/article ? Which one is better ?

 

Actually I think the first one is best. The second is the worst because it's just malformed as it should have the trailing slash. The 3rd one is ok, however my experience has shown that directories with keywords are valued higher then individual file names with the same keywords so your first one where the keywords are a directory would be most valuable.

Doing it in this manner though isn't always best for web development standards as having a separate directory for each page can become burdensome to manage.

 

the 2nd one is definitely better as the 1st one is creating a subdomain which essentially makes it a brand new site and it doesn't leverage anything from your main site. The second one uses subdirectories which will let is utilize the strength of the main domain.

 

You're right, the first one is the best. Not only because of the reasons already mentioned, but if you were to change the file extension (.html to .php or .cfm or .aspx or whatever) you don't have to worry about links getting broken. However, the second one is technically acceptable and shouldn't vary much (if at all) from the first.

However, what I would do is separate the keywords in the directory paths with dashes to make them easier to read and understand by not only people but search engines as well.