I've recently just finished building a small website and created friendly URLs using IIS7.5' rewrite module.
The site has now been passed to the client's SEO guy and he says the friendly URL format I've used is extremely "catastrophically" bad for Google.
Currently, the URLs look like this:
www.example.com/products/123/1234/category_name/page_name
SEO guy says that Google sees this as being a page deep inside the folder structure and thus gives it a low ranking.
Now, I should be able to remove the category details from the URL and get it down to
www.example.com/products/123/page_name
- or
www.example.com/products/page_name/123
and I can re-arrange the order of the URL parameters if that helps, but SEO guy says this is still very bad and he wants it reduced to only 2 elements.
So, my question is, how much does the length or number of parameters in a URL affect a page's ranking? should I restructure the site in an effort to reduce the number of parameters? Or is SEO guy overstating the problem?