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A competitor in our niche uses the url structure for their website like this example and it ranks #1 for this catergory plus 200+ others;

  • example.com/shoes/chicago

If you remove the /chicago/ parameter, the url becomes example.com/shoes/ and displays a 404 error. I was of the understanding that Google liked a structure such as below for preventing empty folder content and to promote rank authority;

  • example.com/chicago/shoes
  • example.com/chicago/shoes/blue-shoes
  • example.com/chicago/shoes/red-shoes

or like this;

  • example.com/shoes-chicago/blue-shoes
  • example.com/shoes-new-york/blue-shoes

I am interested in opinion here because I am setting up our new url structure and need to get it right.

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  • Real users hardly ever type an URL in the address bar anymore. For some time users could even hide the address bar in some browsers, but this feature quickly disappeared when the address bar could also be used for the default search engine (which often is Google). This must confuse normal users even more, and I don't think many of them know what an URL is anymore. They might know what a domain is, but that's it. This would also imply that Google doesn't care all that much about your URL's anymore. It's probably not what determines your ranking. See also Google's: pagespeed.web.dev
    – KIKO Software
    Commented Aug 5 at 9:13
  • Thanks for your comment @KIKO Software. I think url structure does matter to Google to understand site structure for indexing, thereby affecting ranking position. So if Googlebot looks at example.com/shoes and there is 404 page I have wasted crawl effort. I am trying to avoid that.
    – redmacgirl
    Commented Aug 13 at 2:15

1 Answer 1

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Use the visible url structure that feels normal for the user. Use the internal folder structure that works for organising your content. Then map one to the other with rewrites.

SEO depends on too many things, the url is a tiny fraction, if at all.

On my sites example.com/shoes would probably redirect to something useful for the user, but probably still return a 404. Using a custom error page.

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  • Thank you @Rohit Gupta. I would like to avoid rewrites. Redirect to alternate content page may be option. With the broadly accepted url structure such as this -example.com/category/sub-category/post - where would city fit?
    – redmacgirl
    Commented Aug 13 at 2:45

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