Hi all, I'll make up a fictional story with 100% relation to my concern and situation. Say I have a site related to hockey cards. My domain is myhockeycards.com. One of my subpages is full of brett hull cards. I want to stick that subpage in a directory called hockey cards. I want to target "hockey cards" and "brett hull hockey cards" as my keywords. So basically the URL would be myhockeycards.com/hockeycards/bretthull.html. I'm wondering, will google penalize me for the keywords hockey cards, cards, brett hull hockey cards... if I create my subpage in the hockeycards directory? Should I remove the hockeycards directory? will keeping the hockeycards directory help me in SEO for the keywords hockey cards and anything used with hockey cards (ie crosby hockey cards, sundin hockey cards, etc) Thanks
I think the hockeycards directory would just be redundant. Those keywords are already in your url. You won't get any benefit by repeating those keywords. It may help to put those keywords in the page names instead. It is highly unlikely that Google will penalize you for either of these scenarios. If in doubt, check what your top ranked competitors use for their urls. In the end rankings will mostly come down to offpage factors...namely backlinks. So don't spend too much time trying to choose the best directory structure. That time would be better spent building backlinks.