Hi guys, I need your expert opinions: I have this sub-domain: http://apartments.cityguide.com/apartments.php I'm wondering if repeating the apartment keyword in the 4th position can be considered like SEO spam? Thanks for all your pertinent opinions.
In your particular example, it's okay... Not going to get you penalized or anything. It's very common to see the same word in the URL multiple times. It happens all the time with category pages and the more specific subpages like: http://www.example.com/apartments/winter-lakes-apartments.com If you start seeing a keyword more than 2 or 3 times in a URL it starts to look spammy. But keyword rich URLs carry so little weight in the ranking algorithm, I doubt Google would even waste the time and energy trying to penalize you unless you were just blatently spamming the hell out of it.
I agree, you definitely wouldn't get penalized for that. There is nothing spammy about it. Using a keyword twice in a url doesn't really add any extra benefits though. So if possible, just using http://apartments.cityguide.com/ as the url may be a bit better.