Ok we know that keywords in a url can help slightly but it is no biggy. However we really do know that Google hates repetition. For example they penalise you for having the same meta descriptions on two pages with different content. Fair play if you ask me. However, If we have two similar URL's that use the same keywords but legitimately point to different pages will google consider this as repetition? For example: www.ABCDE.com/digital-cameras/ This page would talk about digital cameras www.ABCDE.com/products/digital-cameras/ This page would sell digital cameras Yes it is very clear to us that they are different but I am not so sure google will know the difference regardless of the fact the second page is in a directory called "products". Has anyone had any experience with this one?
They'd know, but they wouldn't care as they clearly have different objectives. One is providing content about the product while the other is clearly trying to sell it. Oh, and I've never seen someone get penalized for having the same META description on multiple pages. They don't even USE META tags for ranking purposes anyway.
Thanks for the advice Dan, Yeah well I thought the same as you to be honest until a very highly ranking site of mine got ditched. The only thing we could think of was that the Meta Descriptions were identical. Clearly Google says that it should be indicative of the content on the specific page. We amended them and our listings directly went back to normal. We've seen this on our e-com site also. Obviously seo is subjective since there is no rule book but those are what we discovered and we're certainly not going to test it again. Every site we do no will have clear Meta Descriptions relating directly to what is on that specific page.
I didn't say they won't whack you like a mole for it -- just that I've never seen them do it (with my own eyes). Sorry to read it happened to you though.
Yup - I own a bunch of ecom sites so I've run into this issue often - don't sweat it. If the page content is different you won't get slapped for similar page names in different directories.