Which URL is More Effective?

Hey guys,

Which URL do you think is more effective?

example.com/view-city.cfm?city=Cumberland&state=Maryland

example.com/Maryland/Cumberland.cfm

example.com/US/Maryland/Cumberland.cfm

example.com/US/Maryland/AlleganyCounty/Cumberland.cfm

You get the idea.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

Sincerely,
Travis walters

 

The last one.

 

I think this URL "example.com/US/Maryland/AlleganyCounty/Cumberland.cfm"

Caused this URL is rich of Keywords

 

shorter is more effective than long

 

Hey there,

Thanks for the prompt response.

If example.com is PR 5, each subdirectory would get -1 PR wouldnt it?

So the AlleganyCounty subdirectory would have PR2?

I do like the last one the best just because all those keywords are there.

Guess I will have to run a script to make a ton of directories heh.. fun

Sincerely,
Travis Walters

 

I think the second one.

 

I am also on that.

 

Yeah this url will definetly help you in terms of SEO

 

All the URL is bad ! I saw there is capitalization! avoid it. Dont use capital letter to make URL it can kill you !

@ first URL
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

 

I would rather tell you to go for the second one

 

I also agree with the last option....

 

As dynamic site can say example.com/view-city.cfm?city=Cumberland&state=Maryland is the best URl

 

I think the thried one

 

What you guys are thinking with URL ? URL may be differ. Your work should be involved.

Did you think This URL will be place in the top. ? Keyword in the Title does matter, no matter which URL it is.

Do better research lols

 

I chose the last, best for Seo

 

The last URL would be the best if your visitors frequently use the term 'Allegany County' to search with. If most of your searches come from keywords such as PRODUCT Cumberland, including 'Allegany County' in the URL is diluting the value of your more important keyword, Cumberland.

 

First of all, every one of those URLs are poor choices. NEVER use mixed case URLs. A lot of search engines are case sensitive. I recommend ALL of your URLs be lower case. If your webserver receives a request for a URL that is NOT lower case then 301 redirect the request to the a lower case version of the URL.

Keyword rich URLs are considered in Google's algorithm, but they have very little overall effect to your ranking for a particular keyword. It is a 'fine tuning' on-page SEO technique. You can get much more bang for your buck (or time) by worrying about things like having excellent <title>, <h1>, <h2> elements... good content... a good information architecture with a clean navigation system using good link text for interlinking between pages.

There is no 'right' answer to the original posters question... I would say that obviously it would be better to NOT use query string parameters... Query string parameters present issues to a lot of search engines. Google can handle long URLs with multiple query string parameters, but a lot of engines will ignore everything after the 2nd or 3rd query string.

Also which URL would be best depends on which keyword phrase you are trying to make the page rank for... example.com/Maryland/Cumberland.cfm might be best if you want to rank for "Cumberland Maryland".

Using URLs like example.com/US/Maryland/AlleganyCounty/Cumberland.cfm implies several things. It means you're going to have a page about the US (example.com/US/), you're going to have a page about Maryland (example.com/US/Maryland/), a page about Allegany County in Maryland (example.com/US/Maryland/AlleganyCounty/), AND a page about Cumberland in Allegany Count in Maryland (example.com/US/Maryland/AlleganyCounty/Cumberland.cfm).

Websites frequently use long URLs like this and then fail to implement pages at each of the sub-URLs... This is a TERRIBLE user experience. A lot of users navigate around the site by chopping off sections of the URL. So if they are at example.com/US/Maryland/AlleganyCounty/Cumberland.cfm and they want to see the county page, they will chop off "Cumberland.cfm" in their browser address bar. If you don't have a page their your server is likely going to return a 403 Permission Denied error page.

 

Hey there,

I never heard that capitalization is bad for crawlers. Does these crawlers income Google and Yahoo? I could care less about smaller browsers as I only want to deal with the big boys

Having said that, it wouldnt be too difficult to do something like...

example.com/us/maryland/allegany-county/cumberland.cfm

I do realize that there are other elements such as title, h1, h2, etc. that are more important. However, to get to the top I want to use whatever means I can to gain that edge with SEO.

I do plan to have a page at each subdirectory - that is for each state, county, and city.

example.com/us/maryland/index.cfm (state page)
example.com/us/maryland/allegany-county/ (county page)
example.com/us/maryland/allegany-county/cumberland.cfm (city page)

I was not planning on having a country page but I wanted that there incase I extend the website in the future to other countries.

Sincerely,
Travis Walters

 

example.com/US/Maryland/AlleganyCounty/Cumberland.cfm
is good for search engines,
example.com/Maryland/Cumberland.cfm
is good for users.

 

You can leave US in the URL without have a page there... Simply put a 301 redirect in place so that if someone requests example.com/us or example.com/us/ that they are 301 redirected to your home page. Later if you decide to create a example.com/us/ page then simply remove the 301. Or you can just let the user see your 403 error page, but I think that is a poor user experience.