SEO impact of the anatomy of URL subdirectory structure?

[bearpaw]

I've been pushing hard to get our Americas site (DA 34) integrated with our higher domain authority (DA 51) international website. Currently our international website is setup in the following format...

• website.com/us-en/
• website.com/fr-fr/
• etc...

The problem that I am facing is that I need my development framework installed in it's own directory. It cannot be at the root of the website (website.com) since that is where the other websites (us-en, fr-fr, etc.) are being generated from. Though we will have control of /us-en/ after the integration I cannot use that as the website main directory since the americas website is going to be designed for scalability (eventually adopting all regions and languages) so it cannot be region specific. What we're looking at is website.com/[base]/us-en. I'm afraid that if base has any length to it in terms of characters it is going to dilute the SEO value of whatever comes after it in the URL (website.com/[base]/us-en/store/product-name.html).

Any recommendations?

[RyanPurkey]

How about website.com/usa/en/  (instead of /us-en/)? Or you could use na for North America if that's your region.

[bearpaw]

Thanks for the feedback Ryan. I may not have been very clear in my response - I know I was bouncing all over the place. usa cannot be my base URL for scalability reasons. Slowly we'll start adopting other countries websites so the top-level subdirectory needs to be broad enough to not restrict us to a specific part of the world.

My intitial thought is to opt for something like website.com/M/us-en or website.com/-/us-en where the base directory is short in hopes that it doesn't dilute the value of SEO terms later in the URL such as website.com/M/us-en/store/product-name.html. Is that something to worry about?

[DirkC]

Length of url & number of folders have some importance (see also http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls - point 6 & 11) but I don't think they are major ranking factors.

What is important however is the depth of the site (how many clicks needed to reach the content you are integrating) - As you are integrating a old site on in another domain - I would try to make sure that you have sufficient crosslinks between the part you are integrating & the existing content. If you only have 1 link from the home to the "integrated" site, you'll be moving the old content one step deeper in the structure, which might have a considerable impact on your ranking (I was unfortunate enough to experience it on one of my sites)

[RyanPurkey]

I see. In that case, sure, any short folder would be fine.  Maybe even 'a' as it reads a little nice: website.com/a/us-en/store/product-name.html.  Reads like, "Website, a US, English language store with the product named X."  Someone seeing the link would have a pretty good idea of what it is going to be.