Should I nest the URLs of pages in the same category?

Question

This is a rather simple question:

Say that on my website I have four pages:

• About (general overview)
• About our Products
• Abour our Clients
• Abour our Workspace

Should the URLs of the four pages be /about, /about/products, about/clients, and about/workspace(respectively), since the latter three belong to the category About?

Or should each have its own non-nested page?: /about, /products, /clients, and /workspace?

Thanks for any responses.

Answer 1

I assume your web page isn't going to have 4 pages (why have a page about products and not display any products?)... Because of this, I am going to answer you twice.

1) Assuming you have 4 pages on your website, go with your first approach.

2) If the website is going to expand, and you will have products displayed (under products), maybe customer testimonials or case studies (under clients) etc, then go with your second approach. This way, everything that is relevant to products lives in a folder called products. This approach also allows for future scalability in SEO (IMO)

Answer 2

ofcourse there is no correct answer or wrong one.

generally speaking, always try using shortest URLS for better URL usability and readability.

in your case, the about word is some sort of default page view, like the homepage of each section, so it is OK to omit it.

you can still mark the information hierarchy with rich snippets breacdcrumbs, this way Google is happy too, and your end users.

Answer 3

Keeping them all in the same directory is easy for accessibility but can clutter the main directory if you are not careful. But at the same time, the same problem will come up with using too many directories.

The rule I learned was to not go too deep 2 or 3 layers past the main xxxx.com directory. In this case where you have 4-5 pages that fit nicely in the "about" realm, I would have:

www.lonely.com/about/ with the pages in that directory.

Better yet, have an index.php and dynamically swap out the content using "index.php?id=clients" in the hyperlink and $_GET to strip the results from the URL.