Hi,

I had an internal discussion today about what would be the best Url. I thought, lets post into the forum to see what others think. Assume an adidas football shoe named T.Unit-F90 and the T.Unit-50

We have next options for the catalog: adidas football shoes or football shoes:

Note: theaspx is removed and the domain name before / as well.
 

OPTION A:
/football-shoes
--> /adidas
--> --> /T-Unit-F-90
--> --> /T-Unit-F-50

Or  OPTION B:
/football shoes
--> /adididas-football-shoes
-->--> --> /adididas-football-shoes/t-unit-f-90
-->--> --> /adididas-football-shoes/t-unit-f-50

Or OPTION C:
/football shoes
--> /adididas-football-shoes
-->--> --> /adididas-football-shoes/adidas-t-unit-f-90-footballshoes
-->--> --> /adididas-football-shoes/adidas-t-unit-f-50-footballshoes

Or OPTION D:
/football shoes
--> /football shoes/adididas-football-shoes
-->--> --> /football shoes/adididas-football-shoes/adidas-t-unit-f-90-footballshoes
-->--> --> /football shoes/adididas-football-shoes/adidas-t-unit-f-50-footballshoes

Or OPTION E:
/football shoes
--> /adididas-football-shoes
-->--> --> /adidas-t-unit-f-90-footballshoes
-->--> --> /adidas-t-unit-f-50-footballshoes

"football shoes" and "adidas football shoes" and "adidas t-unit" are frequently used search words.

The discussion went mainly about D and E options. D contains all relevant search words and gets good hit on all of them, but E would be less overwelming.

Any advice is appreciated.

J.

I'm with Erik in the fact that the shorter and more readable the url, the better.  While there may be a ranking benefit in repeating 'football shoes' many times, at most I think it would be marginal, or otherwise we could create Urls like mysite.com/dotnetnuke-Modules/dotnetnuke-modues/dotnetnuke-modules/dotnetnuke-modules.... etc.  I think you get the idea.  Keyword stuffing definitely looks spammy to both people and undoubtedly search engines. 

However, you could test this easily with a couple of hard-coded pages (ie, outside your shop/catalog system) on two equally searched items, and see which one ranks better and returns more traffic over a period of a month or two.  That's the only way to empirically test what's best for the site, because every site is different, and what works well for one site may not work well for another, depending on things like the audience and internal links, and a whole host of other factors.  This is a low impact way of doing things before you make difficult and expensive changes to your store code.

I think the most most important thing is to get all your key words into the url, whilst keeping it as simple and as logical as possible.  People will click on more readable urls, there's certainly no doubt about that.  If you keep the Url structure logical, then you'll probably get a better result than trying to eke the last nth out of keywords in the url.  But if you want the definitive result, then test, test, test and determine your findings.