Optimal URLs for SEO and UX

[Peter264]

We are considering restructuring the URL scheme on one of the websites we maintain.

We have a few options.

Currently news article URLs are as follows:
http://domain.com/news/1234/article-title-name/

Download section URLs are as follows:
http://domain.com/downloads/files/1234/file-title-of-download-here/

Forum URLS:
http://forum.domain.com/forum/topic/1234/title-of-forum-topic-here/

We feel that these are a bit too long for both SEO and user experience. We want to remove as many directories from the URLs as possible.

From experience, what do you recommend changing for the example URLs above?

We have some ideas below...and we need to keep the ID in the URLs...however I know this is a little frustrating.

Some ideas we have for news articles:
http://domain.com/news/article-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/article-title-shorter-n1234

Some ideas for the download pages:
http://domain.com/downloads/file-title-shorter-d1234
http://domain.com/downloads/files/file-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/file-title-shorter-d1234

Some ideas for the forum URLs:
http://forum.domain.com/topic-title-shorter-t1234
http://forum.domain.com/topic/topic-title-shorter-1234

What do you think of these suggestions? Any other URL ideas? Recommended URL length?

The purpose of is question was to find the perfect URLs for the site we are working on; your thoughts, suggestions and tips are very much appreciated.

[Peter264]

Sorry that this post looks so messy, I'm posting from an iPad and it's not taking the line breaks from the plain text editor... I'll see if I can add some HTML breaks...

[danatanseo]

No worries.I think your post looks fine. Here's my recommendation (and much of this is based on advice given by Everett Sizemore in his webinar on technical SEO for E-commerce).  Even if your site isn't an e-commerce site, I think what I am going to recommend still holds true.

My recommendation would be to keep the news, downloads file and forums subdirectories in place. The reason I recommend this is from a content management and organization standpoint. Even if your site isn't large now, you probably want it to grow significantly. Once it does, or if it is already a large site, managing your content from a hierarchical and organizational standpoint will be so much easier if you leave those subdirectories in place. Imagine trying to move to a new platform at some point int the future and having ALL of your content only one level down. When you go to list out all of your URLs, without that subdirectory in them, you'll have no idea from looking at the URL where that page is on the site.

Also, if the site is well-established (say, more than five years old) and has built up some decent authority, be aware that 301 redirects to pass authority, but they don't pass ALL authority, so you could be devaluing your existing pages by making the re-writes.

If you feel the site is young enough and would be strengethened in the long run for SEO and UX by having shorter URLS (which I do think is a good idea) then here would be my recommendation:

http://domain.com/news/article-title-shorter-1234

http://domain.com/downloads/file-title-shorter-d1234

http://forum.domain.com/forums/topic-title-shorter-1234

I hope this helps! and by all means check out Everett's webinar located here: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues . I think his advice applies to this scenario even if it's not an e-commerce site.

Dana

[MoosaHemani]

I always recommend the simplest and shortest URL ideas to all my clients because this way a website user can easily guess what the page is about without getting in to page. The short and easy URLs are good with search engines and links as people can easily link to it and as short and clear URLs are SEO friendly you get the search love from it as well...

In your case i would highly recommend to go for the following URL scheme:

News:

http://www.domain.com/news/what-the-news-topic-is/7543

Download Section:

http://www.domain.com/downloads/file-for-download-8743/

Forum URLs:

http://www.domain.com/forum/whatever-thetheat-name-is/

This way you will get lot of search engine and user love. Remember to plan the redactions before you go for implementation or else you might face a SEO smack that would be hard to recover.

hope this helps...

[Peter264]

Thank you do your reply Dana.

The site is over 10 years old, however the URL schema was already updated just over a year ago to the URLs I mentioned above.

Before that, everything was from the root...for example:

http://domain.com/article1234.html
http://domain.com/download1234.html

From a SEO standpoint, do you think that updating the URL structure will be beneficial? I.e. is it really worth it? Are we missing out on organic traffic with the current scheme? And would it be worth changing? Or could we get on just fine without changing anything?

Thank you for your suggestions and comments.

[danatanseo]

Hi Peter,

Given that the site is 10 years old and that the URLs were already updated once fairly recently. I would leave them as they are exceot for those that have more than 3-5 keywords, or those that contain "stop" words like "and" "the" "of" etc. This would be pretty easy to do if you dumped all your URLs into excel and sorted them accordingly.

If you feel very strongly that your search traffic would improve if you changed them, I would suggest picking one section or category of the site and doing those first. Monitor what happens. If you get good results, then go ahead and change the rest.

Hope that helps!

Dana