Best SEO practices SPEED VS CONTENT
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Hi Remko,
This depends on where you'd like to direct the majority of your authority, so if your primary target for authority / rankings is the "real estate in 2015" page (which acts as a page and a subfolder under which other content sits), your perfect example could look like:
www.example.com/real-estate-2015/find-best-prices. I would consider placing both guides and news like this, without a separate subfolder for /news/ and /guides/ after /real-estate-2015/.
A few years ago, the British newspaper Evening Standard resolved its home page on www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/ (they used the "This Is London" domain until recently). Articles sat on www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article1234. They redirected their home page to the root - www.thisislondon.co.uk. All articles continued to sit on URLs like www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article1234 Soon thereafter, their share of voice and traffic took a very big drop. It looks like redirecting authority away from the /standard/ subfolder was the cause: all the millions of articles sitting under /standard/ appeared to lose authority. Reversing the redirect reversed this trend and the site gained its lost rankings / traffic back.
In your case, I'd suggest that 2015 real estate authority should focus on the subfolder (acting also as a page in its own right) that you wish to have rank for related terms, unless it's more important to you to direct authority to a guides or news subfolder.
This is different from the tummy tuck example, and in truth you will be able to build authority to the 2015 section with either option, but it does appear that Google sees subfolders as accumulating authority in the manner you suspected initially.
Thanks,
Jane