I know that it is bad to have too many subdirectories in a url, so I'm considering taking my urls that look like this: http://www.domain.com/first/second/third and changing them to: http://www.domain.com/first-second/third Would that improve the rank? Also, which of these is better? http://www.domain.com/BeginningMiddleEnd or http://www.domain.com/Beginning-Middle-End thank you!
there's nothing wrong using hyphen this way. in fact, by using hyphens, you can use multiple words on one filename.
I have four mini sites that now carry a PR4 but do not rank for the key words that are hyphenated in the file names. This PR was given in the last update so the rankings may not yet be set for these sites. The key words are very competitive but the main site ranks well for similar phrases.
In theory hyphenated URLs really only help for one reason: when someone links to your website and uses your URL as the anchor text the se spiders will substitute a space for the hyphens thus giving you a keyword rich indexed anchor. I believe its been proven the big 3 dont put much (or any?) weight on filenames or domain names for assigning topical relevance.
Oh so are you saying this: http://www.domain.com/#Beginning-Middle-End is better than this: http://www.domain.com/Beginning-Middle-End ? I couldn't find anything about this in the documentation I have been reading. Do you know of a good reference that talks about all the details of link formatting for SEO? thank you!