Could this URL issue be affecting our rankings?

[Gmorgan]

Hi everyone,

I have been building links to a site for a while now and we're struggling to get page 1 results for their desired keywords. We're wondering if a web development / URL structure issue could be to blame in what's holding it back.

The way the site's been built means that there's a 'false' 1st-level in the URL structure. We're building deeplinks to the following page:

www.example.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-overview

However, if you chop off the 2nd-level, you're not given a category page, it's a 404:

www.example.com/blue-widgets/ - [Brings up a 404]

I'm assuming the web developer built the site and URL structure this way just for the purposes of getting additional keywords in the URL. What's worse is that there is very little consistency across other products/services. Other pages/URLs include:

www.example.com/green-widgets/widgets-in-green

www.example.com/red-widgets/red-widget-intro-page

www.example.com/yellow-widgets/yellow-widgets

I'm wondering if Google is aware of these 'false' pages* and if so, if we should advise the client to change the URLs and therefore the URL structure of the website.

• This is bearing in mind that these pages haven't been linked to (because they don't exist) and therefore aren't being indexed by Google. I'm just wondering if Google can determine good/bad URL etiquette based on other parts of the URL, i.e. the fact that that middle bit doesn't exist.

As a matter of fact, my colleague Steve asked this question on a blog post that Dr. Pete had written. Here's a link to Steve's comment - there are 2 replies below, one of which argues that this has no implication whatsoever. However, 5 months on, it's still an issue for us so it has me wondering...

Many thanks!

[josh-riley]

URLs - headache! We have a terrible URL structure because of the ways we have to pull data, so this is something that I have checked into, too. Now, I will say there's lots of differing opinions on this. I will share with you what someone from Google said last week at SMXWest: they just want you to know about bad links, they don't penalize you for them.

I'm not saying that's the end-all-be-all answer, but she knows that there's a perception that it can 'ding' you when the reality (according to her) is that they drop 404 pages from their index because they don't serve up bad pages. You have lots of bad pages, less linking ability, less pages to have rank and you can lose online visibility. There's a difference between losing visibility because your overall content offering is reduced by bad links and those pages never having existed in the first place.

There's a good chance there's something else going on -one of the things I adore about this forum is that people here have crazy skills and I have witnessed them uncover an issue the original poster didn't even know they had.

[Dr-Pete]

It's ahrd to address in blog comments, but these things can be very situational. In a perfect world, I don't like those phantom folder levels for 2 reasons:

(1) Someone will eventually try to link to or access one, including possibly Google, and that may lead to odd behavior. I've seen claims Google will extrapolate URLs, but have never seen clear proof.

(2) It just makes for long URLs that, in this case, look a bit spammy.

Practically, is it making a difference? They aren't being indexed, so that's certainly a positive sign - it indicates no weird extrapolation by Google and no inbound links to those levels. At the same time, as discussed in my post, revamping your entire URL structure does carry risk.

So, it's not ideal (IMO), but I'm not sure I'd mess with it unless you're changing URLs for other reasons (then, do it all at once).