Would including some of the same words in every product URL be considered keyword stuffing?

Question

I have about 130 products on my site, and I want the URL to look like this example.com/unique-product-name-ratings-reviews-prices.

Since I have 130 of these pages, I am concerned about the (ratings-reviews-prices) portion of the URL, and afraid it may look like keyword stuffing, though the page will contain info about all 3 of those things.

Answer 1

The repetition of -ratings-reviews-prices in the URL would probably be considered spammy as it would appear on every single product page without variation in the position and, if you are not careful, without the appropriate context. In other words, if you do it, you had better have actual prices, ratings, and reviews on each page to avoid a different penalty. But if you have that, you don't need to stuff the URL (q.v.).

Cutts talks about this in an interview from waaaaay back in 2008 (go about a quarter of the way down to see it) and given Google's recent emphasis on improving its index and combating spam I can only assume the alogrithm takes repeated words in the URL into account and would apply a penalty.

I also tend to agree with Cutts' position that stuffing the URL is not necessary. You could very easily create a situation where each of those words appears in-context in the page and high enough on the page that Google will both consider it a natural and relevant occurrence. You could also vary up the title and description and add one of those words to each of those areas if you figure out a way to do it naturally.

Answer 2

Web sites typically duplicate a lot in the URL because URLs are often based on folder structure. Having keywords at the end is more spammy than having them at the beginning where they might be used to specify the template in which the data is shown, or the folder in which the data is stored.

Because so many sites duplicate keywords across all their URLs, I highly doubt Google would either

• Put much weight on them from a ranking perspective
• Penalize for them

I would suggest leaving them out.

• It makes the URLs more complex -- harder for users to remember or type
• Doesn't make the URL more compelling to users -- The product name is the most compelling part to let users know what they are clicking on. On the other hand, some users might be looking for ratings and reviews specifically.
• Won't provide much (if any) SEO value
• Makes the URLs longer -- more likely to be truncated