url # characters

[newreality]

I have a site URL with secondary tags going 3-4 levels deep approaching 80 characters in length.

A) What is the max # of characters that is indexable?

B) Do keyphrase terms nearest the main URL gain greater relevancy?
(versus those at the end of the url string)

[Wail]

Do you mean you've a site with three or four levels of directories/folders?

In Las Vegas last year Yahoo! said that a depth of about three was safe whereas a directory depth of six would probably be too deep. Clearly it depends on the site itself though, the more importance it has and the more deep links it enjoys then the more the search engines will be willing to explore it.

Google's new Sitemap XML will also help very deep sites.

A) There's no hard and fast rules on the length of a file name. Google tends to look out for the unusual. If your file names are unusually long then Google may well flag that as a spam indicator.

B) A Google Patent application suggests that commercial keywords in a domain name is also a spam indicator. The advantages, however, of having keywords in your domain or top level directories is that when people use the URL as the anchor text that you benefit from that. For example, http://www.example.com has the keyword example in it and http://www.example.com/test also has the keyword test in it (this works on these forums because the URL is automatically parsed into a hyperlink).

[newreality]

Do you mean you've a site with three or four levels of directories/folders? Yes.

About your "B" I'm not sure I follow this.

Most of the serps returned are those mainly the keywords/phrases in the tags. I undertand the concept of anchor text but even when anchored link text isn't used, Google still highights the terms among the results. Examples are everywhere.

You are saying they consider this spam?

[Wail]

I'm paraphrasing patent application US 2005/0071741 A1 which identifies how Google works out commercial words and then says that commercial words in the domain suggest a greater likelihood of spam. According to the application this means Google will apply a lower trust threshold to the site so if there are other suspicious activities there then it's more likely to get classified as spam.

A spam indicator does not mean the site is spamming.

[newreality]

...works out commercial words Do you mean business to business type words or keywords/phrases in general?

[Wail]

Google defines commercial words as those with a high search frequency and for which pages at the top of the index have a high score (ie, optimised) and when the rankings change frequently (ie, competition).

[crazylogic]

I would not count on the use of keywords in the URL giving you any big advantage. I believe the domain name is important because you only have one of them but anybody.com can add a directory anybody.com/keyword. it would not make sence for search engines to look at the directory names for ranking reasons. It would likely end up that only sites that have SEO people would rank first. For search engines i think the page title will always be more important, It looks good for the search engine if the title matches the search keywords. If the page is spam that webmaster got one over on the search engine; but nobody looking at the serps would look at the URL and see the keyword in a directory of the domain and consider the Search Engine to have done a good job by feeding up that page.

There may be other important considerations; take searchenginewatch.com, nearly everybody who links to it uses "Search Engine Watch" in the title, and for the forums page "Search Engine Watch Forums" ... they may also link to the main page with "Search Engines Report". In all these cases this site is linked to with the words (Search, Engine, Engines, forums, report).

So IMHO if your usage of directory names helps other sites with what they use for anchor text to link to your site. On that front you would be getting keywords in anchor text from other sites.

I would also add, if the directory only contains another directory, that could look fishy and could easily be filtered.