Help me choose a new URL structure

[seo-wanna-bs]

Good morning SEOMoz. I have a huge website, with hundreds of thousands of pages.

The websites theme is mobile phone downloads. I want to create a better URL structure.

Currently an example url is /wallpaper/htc-wildfire-wallpapers.html

My issue with this, first and foremost is it's a little spammy, for example the fact it's in a wallpaper folder, means I shouldn't really need to be explicit with the filename, as it's implied.

Another issue arises with the download page. For example /wallpaper/1234/file-name-mobile-wallpaper.html

Again it's spammy but also the file ID, is at folder level, rather than within the filename. Making the file deeper and loses structure.

I am considering creating sub domains, based on model, to ensure a really tight silo. i.e htc.domain.com/wallpaper/wildfire/ and the download page would be htc.domain.com/wallpaper/file-name-id/

But due to restrictions with the CMS, this would involve a lot of work and so I am considering just cleaning up the url structure without sub domains.

/wallpaper/htc/wildfire/ and the download page would be /wallpaper/file-name-id/

What are your thoughts?

Somebody suggested having the downloads in no folder at all, but surely it makes sense for a wallpaper, to be in a wallpaper folder and an app to be in an app folder? If they were not in a folder, I'd need to be more explicit in the naming of the files.

Any advice would be awesome.

[Nola504]

Why not organize by phone type?

So domain.com/htc/wallpaper/1243/file.html

When you optimize for humans, the keywords and url structures makes more sense.

If I were to search for an iphone wallpaper it would be just that iphone > wallpaper, not wallpaper iphone. Or maybe walpaper for iphone, but let's not get technical.. hehe.

And depeding on site structure you could use the /file.hmtl page as the canonical of the download page.

I wouldn't go the route of subdomains.

Good luck, Cyril

[CleverPhD]

This is not an SEO question per se, it is really a business question.  How do you need to organize your wallpapers to give you the information you need with your business.

Depending on how you generate your revenue you may want to organize by type of phone, etc.  Tools like Google Analytics will sort things by folder and so if you build in a logical structure for your business model, you can then use the insights to help your business.

Example, if you were paid depending on the type of theme, then you would need to organize around themes.  If you simply wanted to see what themes as a group were the most popular, then organize by themes.  Lots of things to consider.  How do your users think about browsing wallpapers?  Setup your directories so that it makes sense to them when they are browsing your site or looking at your URL in the SERPs.

That said, I would organize by folder.  Helps when you need to analyze traffic to the site if things are in logical organized folders.  Also makes it easy to group.

Good luck!