I am a developer in the middle of the development of a medium-sized website. A requirement that we just received from the resident SEO person on the project is for all the URLs on the site to be just off the root (e.g. /product-name
, /small-keywords-separated-by-hyphens
).
Here is an example (one of a few, both I think this is the one that would potentially favor his viewpoint the most):
- Solutions
http://example.com/solutions/
- 1.1 Showcase
http://example.com/showcase/
- 1.2 Healthcare
http://example.com/healthcare/
- 1.3 Education
http://example.com/education/
- 1.4 Residential
http://example.com/residential/
- 1.5 Industrial
http://example.com/industrial/
- 1.1 Showcase
To be clear, I'm advocating a structure like: /solutions/showcase
, /solutions/healthcare/
, etc.
To me, there are clearly defined sections of the site, there are various parts of content which seem to deserve their own place in the structure of the site.
Here were his points:
Decreased keyword density for the words being targeted in the URL, the longer the URL the less emphasis is being placed on the keywords being targeted in the URL
Decreased emphasis on the importance of the page from a search engine standpoint, the further the page rests off of the root the less importance is attributed to that page
Decreased adaptability over time, for example when time comes to redesign the site again in the future, suppose the navigation changes, by incorporating the folder you have reduced your ability to re-use the URLs on the new site and minimize any slippage in the search results
Decreased usability for advertising the URL, suppose [company] wants to run a print campaign on a particular [product], the shorter URL would be more user friendly and more likely to lead to a conversion
The points I made in response were around user experience and based off this document from Google.
Personally I've never seen the structure he is proposing.
Is this type of thing best practice for SEO?