SEO Question about URL Slashes in Slugs

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I do a lot of development in Codeigniter and WordPress, but I’m wondering something in terms of SEO when it comes to URL segmentation. WordPress automatically adds children page slugs onto a parent page. For example:

http://example.com/parent/child/child/

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Would it be better for SEO reasons to go with the following?

http://example.com/parent-child-child/

Thanks in advance.

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3 comments

  1. Short Answer: No.

    Search engines place little ranking relevance on where a page is located in terms of its folder depth/heirachy.

    @spuriosdata’s “consultants” are confusing link-level depth (e.g. how many ‘hops’) from the root level a page is accessed, with ranking decay based on how many nested folders deep the page is.

    Linking hierarchy is different from folder hierarchy – hence the recommendation that you try to link from your top level content (e.g. homepage) to your deeper content directly.

    Additionally, little SEO or ranking value is based on URL structure. Yes, all other things being equal, keywords in the URL tend to perform better than those without. Yes, all other things being equal, keywords positioned closer to the domain in the URL tend to perform better (for exact matches) than those that don’t. But we are talking 9/10th of stuff-all in terms of the overall ranking algorithm.

    You should be concentrating on making your URLs usable for your visitors just as much as search engines. This means communicating where pages sit in relation to their parent pages/folders as well.

    StackOverflow (and by extension, the larger StackExchange network) has a pretty good example of a SEO friendly URL structure.

  2. Based on the reports of consultants that we’ve hired in the past: Yes. According to them lower precedence is placed on each path-part keyword as it’s distance from the root increases.

    Basically meaning that this:

    example.com/my-post-name-that-contains-good-keywords/2011/01/01

    is better than:

    example.com/2011/01/01/my-post-name-that-contains-good-keywords