Repeating Terms In URL Helpful?

[newreality]

Planning a site's navigational structure, I am wondering about folders and terms.

Does MSN (& other search engines) rank a site differently if a key term being searched on is repeated within the entire URL.

EX:

blueshirts.com
bludeshirts.com/discount-shirts.html
or
blueshirts.com/mens/discount-shirts.html

[David Wallace]

Placing keywords in a URL doesn't have enough effect to really worry much about it in my experience. Do what is best for your visitors as well as your webmaster. As far as optimization, focus more on optimizing title tags and the actual content of your pages.

[I, Brian]

Planning a site's navigational structure, I am wondering about folders and terms.

Does MSN (& other search engines) rank a site differently if a key term being searched on is repeated within the entire URL.

EX:

blueshirts.com
bludeshirts.com/discount-shirts.html
or
blueshirts.com/mens/discount-shirts.html
I don't believe that "shirts" will be read from the domain anyway - to search engines unless there's punction or spaces to break up words, then joined words are more often than not going to be perceived as new words.

So "blueshirts" is not seen as "blue" + "shirts" but simply the word "blueshirts".

Using keyword URLs can be useful, but ultimately are only one part of a general "on-page elements" armour. (I've actually removed many of my own keyworded URL, considering them as over-optimised and not useful for human users - which is ultimately who is being optimised for).

As an additional point, though, it's worth using your files as folder index files, such as:

blueshirts.com/mens/shirts/

instead of

blueshirts.com/mens/shirts.html

because Search Engines actually read URLs rather than pages - so if you change your URLs, such as having new page extensions - .shtml or .php or .asp from .html - then you lose prior rankings and have to go through all the indexing + ranking process all over again.

Folder paths removes that annoyance, and can make URLs much more natural, too.

For example:

blueshirts.com/mens-shirts-us-distributors-arizona.html

vs

blueshirts.com/mens/shirts/us/distributors/arizona/

First can seem tacky and over optimised, but the second looks far more natural as a long URL.

[sugarrae]

Well, MSN currently uses Yahoo for the most part and Yahoo does love keywords in the domains/file names - for the moment anyway. Who knows what the new MSN search will hold or if what works in Yahoo now will work next year. However, I would at least be slightly descriptive in your files names, because it is better from a CTR standpoint, if nothing else.

"I don't believe that "shirts" will be read from the domain anyway - to search engines unless there's punction or spaces to break up words, then joined words are more often than not going to be perceived as new words."

Not true. At least at the moment anyway. They do see the words without a split of any kind:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=blue+shirts&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&cop=mss&tab= - look at the top result and notice how the blue is bolded. The SE does indeed "read between the lines" ;).

Same with G:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=blue+shirts

MSN doesn't have it's own technology - yet - so what Yahoo can do, MSN can do as well - again, for now.

[newreality]

I agree that the hyphenation within the main URL is usually now not necessary for optimization, but it may still be true for the secondary tags. I've gone back and forth with this notion over the past year or two, making observations with such much speculation out there.

This may matter both where the terms "skip" a fair number of seperating terms, and it is a competitive term -- across many pages. Noticed some higher ranking URLS (though it's hard to isolate this to evaluate)with URL's like (hypothetical):

silk-shirts.com/mens/tall/hawaiian

for keyphrase "silk mens hawaiian"

Possibly outperforming

silkshirts.com/mens/tall/hawaiian

Then again this may be the sites I've looked at, which are only a couple I'll admit for this select case. It could very well not be representative.

I do like the idea of creating folder paths without extensions. -Assuming there does not need to be collective phrases held together within the extensions.

Appreciate the replies.

[strategicrankings]

Placing keywords in a URL doesn't have enough effect to really worry much about it....

Keywords in the url do have an effect,IMHO, mainly when your external links only contain your url and no anchor text.

What i mean is, if your domain name is www*.target-keyword.com and you have external links that do no have any anchor text but simply your domain name, then the default anchor will be the URL itself , ie www*.target-keyword.com.

Now that this default anchor contains target-keyword and if your are optimizing for target-keyword, IMHO this link will have value with respect to the target keyword.

i can give you examples of sites that are ranking high for their main target keyword which is also their domain name. Analysis of their backlinks showed most of their backlinks did not have as anchor text their main target keyword but simply their domain name.

[pageoneresults]

I've been reading these topics for years. And, I come from the camp that believe URI strings are part of the overall equation in an SEO campaign.

Instead of looking at it from an SEO standpoint, why not look at it from a usability standpoint. Your URIs should be natural in appearance. They should follow your site structure to the "t". If you have a breadcrumb trail at the top of the page that looks like this...

Home > Autos > Chrysler > Crossfire

Then you will probably have a URI that looks like this...

www.example.com/autos/chrysler/crossfire/

or...

autos.example.com/chrysler/crossfire/

It is only natural. Forget about the search engines when developing your site structure. Think about your users and the memorability of the URIs. Also think about how easily it is to navigate a site where the URI paths are natural and follow the site structure.

From my perspective, keywords in the URI are part of the overall equation. But, you can definitely go overboard. Too many hyphens, strings too long, use of other delimiters, etc. Keep them short, sweet and easy to remember and type in. Work from that standpoint and you'll be that much further ahead. It also makes site management and maintenance a whole lot easier! ;)

[Marcia]

How about:

discount-shirts.com/mens-shirts/cotton-shirts/blue-shirts/blue-cotton-mens-shirts.html

Is that a design for disaster, for excessive repetition?

[Mel]

That seems to me to be a bit too far out from the customers point of view, (unless you are somehow linking to the final page directly from the index page) and I suspect that search engines might find that a bit repetitive also.

If I were designing a directory structure for discount-shirts.com I might do it like this:

discount-shirts.com/mens-shirts/cotton-shirts/mens-cotton-shirts.html

but only if mens-cotton-shirts.html could be navigated directly to from the home page.

[Marcia]

Mel, I wouldn't do it that way - I'm pretty much using it to illustrate using hyphenated keyword-laden URLs to the extreme. I believe there was mention made a while back about one of the engines looking askanse at excessive use of hyphens in URL paths, and what I'm wondering is if using too many hyphens, and too much keyword repetition in URLs, can be counter-productive and possibly lead to a devaluing for scoring eventually.

[Anthony Parsons]

Yep, that is actually one of my test awaiting me to pluck some time from my backside at SEO Testing Marcia. I am quite interested to see how far it goes. I found the same thing recently with a copywriting analyse, to much went backwards, and it wasn't much at all. I am getting more curious to how the engines perceive all these little pieces of the puzzle and whether they are discounting more and more. I think about it often, as if I where a webdesigner with knowing nothing about SEO, then how would I design my site. Would I incorporate all these SEO tactics, or would I just design the site quite naturally, without all these hypens and so forth. Curious!

[dannysullivan]

Discussion about Google's allinurl and similar commands has been moved here: What Do Google's Allinanchor, Allintitle & Allinurl Results Tell Us? (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3131)

FYI, for past threads with advice on keywords in URLs, I recommend these two from June 2004:


Hyphenated URLs (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forum/showthread.php?t=87) SEO and file names (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forum/showthread.php?t=257) Feel free to cross-link to other similar discussions you may have seen. I'm keeping a list of these, as it's a popular topic.

Others to consider:

Change To Link Bomb Sign Of New Link Analysis Shift? (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=700), July 2004 repeating terms in URL (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=1505), Sept. 2004 URL Spaces & Alt Tag Naming Conventions (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=1734), Sept. 2004


Feel free to cross-link to other similar discussions you may have seen. I'm keeping a list of these, as it's a popular topic.

[bobmutch]

Marcia: I think discount-shirts.com/mens-shirts/cotton-shirts/blue-shirts/blue-cotton-mens-shirts.html is to redundant and also to many directories deep.
mens-discount-shirts/blue-cotton.html would do the sam thing just fine. I am not to sure how many would be searching for blue though as most shirts are available in all colors. mens-discount/cotton-shirts.html would be better yet.

[Mel]

Marcia this is from the recent Yahoo Presentation in Las Vegas and might give a bit of a hint on depth issues:

Example
www.mybooks.com/order-of-the-phoenix[/url]
(Depth 1, but may be hard to build a 50K page site this way!!)

www.mybooks.com/uk/fiction/childrens/jkrawlings/harry-potter/order-of-the-phoenix[/url]
(Depth 6, may not get crawled!!)

www.mybooks.com/jkrawlings/harry-potter/order-of-the-phoenix[/url]
(Depth 3, probably a reasonable balance)

Though it doesn't address the issue of repetitive words in the URL.

[pokersearch]

What about dot notation in a URL, such as product.mysite.com
I have noticed a few sites look like this has not hurt there ranking.