Hi Guys, We' re having trouble deciding whether to use a URL naming scheme that is more concise and usable or one that is more keyword-rich and descriptive. Option A: http://widgets.domain.com/green Option B: http://widgets.domain.com/green-widgets Note: We would like to optimize for the search phrase "green widgets". This will of course be in the meta title and headers, but we're not sure how much difference it would make to also include this exact phrase in the URL. Any thoughts? Thanks!
one of the hardest decisions to make, if you rely mainly on traffic directly from a search engine go option B option A is more of a human friendly name
I personally would use neither... I would go w/ http://www.domain.com/green-widgets/. Most people who use subdomains do so for the wrong reasons. They are seen by the search engines as different sites. As such, they can't take advantage of any domain trust or domain authority that the main domain has accumulated. Using subdomains makes it harder for the main domain and subdomain to grow its domain authority. You become an "authority" by having lots of sites linking to lots of different pages on your site. By using subdomains, you are breaking up what would normally be a single site into typically lots of different, much smaller sites. Since each site has fewer pages and are viewed separately, they each will have fewer inbound links... they will each have links to few pages on each site. Very few sites have enough content to warrant subdomains. CitySearch.com and About.com are a couple that do. But even if citysearch creates a subdomain for a single city, they typically have thousands of pages about each city. Unless you have thousands of pages about widgets, I would use subdirectories instead of subdomains. But if you insist on using subdomains, I don't think either of the above would rank any differently. Keyword rich URLs carry VERY little weight in the overall algorithm. But I think http://widgets.domain.com/green-widgets looks better and does a better job of saying what that particular page is about.
Canonical, Thanks for the information. We are in a scenario in which we have enough content to warrant subdomains. Using your example of citysearch.com, the options would be: A: http://sanfrancisco.citysearch.com/san-francisco-restaurants B: http://sanfrancisco.citysearch.com/restaurants I think both of these URLs do a satisfactory job of conveying what the page is about. You think the URL difference is negligible to the algorithm? Do you have any sources for that? (FYI: It turns out they use: http://sanfrancisco.citysearch.com/find/section/sanfrancisco/restaurants.html) Black_Ryan, For discussion's sake, let's assume 50% of traffic will come from search engines. Thanks again.
Again, either of those would work IMO. I feel a bit differently about this particular example. Here where the subdomain is a city you will probably want to have 'standard' cookie cutter templates for each city subdomain. So cityname.example.com/ would be my city's home page where I would highlight other sections of the city subdomain site. I would likely want all city subdomains to have directories for restaurants, hotels, tourist attractions, nightlife, etc. It is much better for the user if the restaurants for a city can always be found at cityname.example.com/restaurants/, hotels can always be found at cityname.example.com/hotels/, etc. This allows the user to easily guess the URL for and jump directly to the restaurants page for a particular city as long as they know the cityname portion of the subdomain name. If they know miami.examples.com/hotels is the Miami hotels page then it's easy to guess that dallas.examples.com/hotels is likely the Dallas hotels page. For this reason I would probably go with option B in this situation. Sometimes usability takes precedence over SEO. This would be one place that I would go with usability first. Yes. I would be willing to bet that you would not see even a 1 position difference in the SERPs between the two. I have heard Matt Cutts at Pubcon say on numerous occasions that having keyword rich URLs is a very minor ranking factor. It would only be 1 of 200+ factors that Google is looking at when they rank your keyword for a particular phrase... and a LOT of the others like inbound link text, relevancy of the pages linking to you, <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, etc. carry a LOT more weight. The reason you should have keyword rich URLs is that in SEO, no one thing other than links really has a drastic effect on rankings. It's typically the sum of LOTS of little things that added together make your rank well. This is one of those little things. Many URLs rank well without any keywords in the URL. It also allows Google to highlight the keywords in your URL which may make your SERP listing more attractive to searchers and more likely that they will click on it.