Seeking URL Advice

[dunklea]

Hey Moz Community,

I'm looking for some URL structure advice for a new directory of a website. We're trying to rank for the term 'internships abroad in <country>'</country> We have roughly 100 pages targeting specific countries.

Right now the URL structure is www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/china, but some of my colleagues believe this structure would be better: www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/intern-in-china. I personally prefer the shorter structure, but we couldn't come to any agreement so we thought we'd pose the question to the community.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

I'm looking for some URL structure advice for a new directory of a website. We're trying to rank for the term 'internships abroad in <country>'</country>

My primary recommendation is:

mysite.com/internships-abroad/china

The above URL is a logical structure. You have one page for each country. You also can offer a category page providing general information such as general advice applicable to anyone considering an internship in another country. The URL has relevancy for your keywords, your site structure and readers. It's not spammy as keywords are not repeated.

Another URL structure that works is:

mysite.com/internships-abroad-china

[AnthonyYoung]

Hi Andrew -

Shorter URLs generally out perform longer URLs. Also, fewer directories or file paths in he URL makes it easier to distribute link juice to the detail pages throughout the site (this necessitates a fairly flat file structure though and may not be the right solution for larger sites with diverse content, products & information requiring more complex taxonomies - this doesn't seem to be necessary in your case however).

I would suggest www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad-china ... you get your keyword phrase in the URL with an economy of words in the process - leaving out '-in-' will save 4 character spaces. You can make up for this in your on-page key term targeting using meta tags, H1's, etc to create the semantic drill-down.

TY

[KeriMorgret]

Ryan, I presume you didn't mean to include a space between internships and abroad, and that the primary recommendation should read mysite.com/internships-abroad/china?

[dunklea]

Thanks, Anthony, for your response. Just to clarify how our CMS works, however, internships-abroad is actually a subdirectory of gooverseas.com. Removing the slash is not possible in this situation.

Does this alter your advise?

Thanks!

[AnthonyYoung]

I would go with the shorter URL structure in this case (http://www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/china) and use on-page key term targeting (as stated above) to help with semantic definition of the page content.

I noticed that none of the country specific pages have Page Authority (using SEOmoz toolbar) -- I'm not an expert on Drupal so not sure if the pages are brand new (they all have very recent cache dates and don't show up in the Internet Archive) -- or if the 'CTools jump menu' is preventing link juice from passing which will be difficult getting them to rank (unless they receive inbound links at some point).

[dunklea]

Thanks again for your feedback!

These pages are all pretty new (4 weeks tops), but we are aware of the link juice issue. Our purposed solution has been to create a page that lists all of our country pages (approx. 125) and have this page linked to from our homepage. Hopefully Google can then get from our homepage to all of our country pages in two jumps.

Sound?

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the correction Keri. You are absolutely correct and I fixed my reply based on your sharp eyes