I know ideally you'd have the keyword in the domain name. But we're pretty far along with our site, and changing will be a bit of a pain. Let's say the domain name is 35hints.com (it's not, but something like this): I'd like the site to rank well for beauty, relationships, and two other content areas. Don't ask why we ended up with that domain, but what's done is done. There are contracts and everything drawn up under that name, so I can't really change it. Registered about 18 months ago. No page rank yet, but some killer links this month that should pop us up. As I see it, my realistic options right now are: 1) Use folder names. Right now, the sections are 35hints.com/section/beauty, 35hints.com/section/relationships, etc. Obviously I can point backlinks to those URLs, but I'm asking about the underlying value of changing the domain name itself. Don't know if the "section" part of the URL is of any consequence. 2) Use subdomains. beauty.35hints.com, relationships.35hints.com, etc. This would be relatively easy to implement I think, but I don't know if it's any better than option #1. 3) Get new domain names. 35beautyhints.com, 35relationshiphints.com, etc. Because the keywords aren't first, I don't know if these would give me any benefit. Do numbers count in Google? Plus they'd be brand new, and thus presumably in the "sandbox", even if I re-jigged it to get the keyword as the first word in each domain name. Any advice? I don't want to go re-doing all my URLs and slicing up my content management system if I don't have to. But I've heard time and again how important having the keywords in the domain name is.
Within a folder, does the number of "/"'s away from the domain matter? In other words, is 35hints.com/section/beauty significantly worse than 35hints.com/beauty?
If this were a problem with "section" then every wordpress blog on the planet just about would have problems since every category name is typically preceeded by example.com/category/ similar to yourdomain.com/section/. The only problem with this is really that if someone requests yourdomain.com/section/ with no section name after it, they'll like get a 404 error. #1 is the absolute best option of the 3. Avoid subdomains... They are treated as separate sites. and 35beautyhints.com is ONLY going to really give you a significant ranking boost for ONE keyword phrase... when users search for "35 beauty hints"... That's it! It's not really going to do anymore for you from an SEO perspective than having the same keywords in folder or page names if someone search for "10 beauty hints" or "beauty hints" or "beauty tips". The only time domain names give you a significant boost in rankings is if the domain name is an EXACT match for the search phrase. Also, #2 and #3 both essentially create 4 different sites in the eyes of the search engines. Subdomains are treated as if they are different sites. They don't get to take advantage of the domain level ranking attributes of the "main" domain like domain authority and domain trust. Each subdomain has to build it's own where a subfolder on the main domain gets to take advantage of these. And domain trust is based on having lots of links to lots of pages on your site. If you split a site into 4 sites, you cut your authority essentially down to 1/4th of what it could be as one site. And now you have 4 sites to maintain instead of one. I would go with #1 and call it a day.
I think 35hints/beauty is way much better that 35hints.com/section/beauty and Google will give it more weight in SERPs.
B4 I get off to bed as mentioned in the PM Kev - when I said be careful who you listen to Canonical doesn't count amongst those to be very wary of - in that den of theives and the eniqitious I mentioned as 99.98% (hey I can never give someone 100% credit) of the time Canonical talks more sense than 99.98% of others in my experience so take note of the advice given!) Back to you tomorrow G'Night!
OMG Now I'm blushing! Thanks... But I'm nothing special... Just here like revelations-decoder and lots of thers trying to help some peeps out even though I am still looking for answers myself. And I agree w/ seonewbie2010. It would be preferable to NOT have /section in the URL. Again it's shorter without it. But I was just assuming you were using some CMS that was forcing you to have one as they often do (damn CMS designers!).
BTW in your question you talks about "beauty tips" Did you try searching for it and see how many sites with the keyword "beauty tips" in the domain name come up on first page, hardly few, there are others too without those in the domain name, so what should it mean, nothing much, that is just another factor, keep in mind that factor while building the sites/sub folders/categories but do not let that drive you 'how to build a site'. That is not the end all of site building. Engage your visitors in valuable and fresh content and keep building backlinks through various methods available online, you should see these factors start diminishing in value over a period of time and google will push you up regardless of these specific factors.
I would drop option #2 - subdomains, and go with #1. Option #3 is good but it costs extra for the domain names registration. For option #1, you can drop the keywords like "section" "category" etc. Then the url will look like 35hints.com/beauty/beauty-tips.html.
Jeez, you guys are terrific! Thanks! I'll see if I can drop the "section" from the URL string, although as you've said, presumably Google is smart enough to figure out that the millions of Wordpress and Drupal sites with this word in the URL string aren't all about "sections".
Who said Google was smart? LOL Just kidding - Google's as smart as the next Black Hat mainipulation that it squishes to help stop us all getting crud search results.