URL structure with 3 subcategories

Question

I have 1 main category and 1 subcategory and 1 additional "topic" or "area":

main categories: news, interview, tutorial

subcategories e.g. for news: shopping, entertainment, politics, sport etc.

so if there were only these 2 categories it's easy the url would be:

http://example.com/news/shopping

and detail page something like:

http://example.com/2013/12/17/people-are-buying-more-presents-via-internet

But, I need to add the additional "category" or "area" there. E.g. continents:

So, I was thinking about:

http://example.com/europe/news/shopping
http://example.com/africa/news/shopping
...

What do you think about this approach from a SEO perspective? To me it seems logical, but Google may think differently.

Another "problem"is that some articles are international. How to solve that? So they need to appear in all categories.

How structure the URL then?

Would it be counted as a duplicate content? Because the detail page for these articles would still be the same e.g.:

http://example.com/2013/12/17/people-are-buying-more-presents-via-internet

Answer 1

Your folder structure looks fine, nothing to worry about there. However, you might not want to go any deeper that that, as research by moz.org says:

The quantity of subfolders in a URL appears to correlate to rankings. URLs with fewer trailing slashes perform better than those with more. Additionally, search engine representatives have recommended that excessive, subfolders in a URL string may be a signal that the page is very deep in a site’s structure and may be less valuable/worthwhile to crawl, index and rank.

Recommendation: Rewrite the URL to include no more than 3 subfolder levels (4 trailing slashes following the domain name)

In your second question, if the content is only being served on a single URL, then there is no duplicate content to worry about, even if you are linking to the single page from multiple categories.