Does the number of subdirectories in a URL affect its ranking?
Why Webmasters Stack Exchange recommends it
Webmasters Stack Exchange users cite it to back up claims that URL folder depth has no real effect on Google rankings, and that click distance from the homepage matters instead.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2012 to 2018.
What it is
A short 2010 Google Search Central video in which Matt Cutts answers a viewer question about whether having fewer subdirectory levels in a URL gives higher rankings. He explains that click depth from the home page matters more than the number of folders in the path.
What people said
Cites Su' · 2012-01 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Friendly URLs: is there a max length for search engines?”
It's not the search engines' place to decide how long URLs should be; they just have to index them. That said, extremely long URLs with lots of keywords and such might start getting you flagged as potentially suspicious. They don't come up(for me) as much anymore, but think back to when search results for certain things tended to be overwhelmed with matches from eg. ohiorefrigeratorrepairparts.com/kenmore/etc/etc... On the whole, sure your URLs are "friendly" but they're also trying a bit too hard. You're making the mistake of thinking that your URL structure has to precisely match your site/content structure. Keeping URLs concise is another factor in friendliness. For more on that, see @Lit
Cites Mike Hudson · 2012-04 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Is it better to use slash or hyphens for SEO”
I'm not downvoting this, but I'd have to agree with how this answer has been positioned as factual with no evidence to back it up. Having run this particular scenario on a very large site, I would have to say there is NO evidence that this has any measurable SEO benefit. In fact Matt Cutts has stated [this video] that it's the number of clicks or 'hops' from your main page that has the level of influence that is being described here - SEO's have extrapolated this to also mean 'folder depth'.
Cites jezzipin · 2015-04 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Do shorter URLs benefit the pagerank and overall SEO value of pages vs. a longer categorised url showing the site structure”
We are coming to the end of a long project in which we are upgrading our client's site from a custom built CMS to the latest version of Umbraco CMS whilst also making their website responsive. As part of this upgrade process, the URL structure of the site has changed however, we are mainly handling this with 301 redirects so that old redundant links from the old site now link to the new URLs. Last week, our client threw a major spanner in the works by telling us that the 'SEO experts' that he started using on his current site have said the site structure the new Umbraco site uses is unworkable and is also bad for SEO because it has a lot of 'levels'. Their main concern is that their products
Cites Goyllo · 2017-01 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Will the number of categories in a WordPress custom post type URL affect SEO?”
It does not affect in SEO [this video] , go with what easiest for you. Personally I will go with second permalink.
Cites Goyllo · 2017-07 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Does Hashtag in the URL affect SEO rankings for as Angular JS web application”
Google just don't understand what the meaning of /#!/ or any other thing like /10787/ in this question URL, but they can crawl the hashbang [LINK] /#!/ URL just like other URL's. I suggest to go for clean URL's, if it take only few hours to setup, it will impress your visitors as well. The keyword in URL affect very very small in ranking [LINK] , but the position of keyword like after /#!/ or /10787/ or after 3 sub directory does not make much difference. [this video]
Cites Electron · 2018-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “SEO: Separate domain targeting each state or one domain with state-specific sections”
SEO vs CTR vs Usability Duplicate Content & Canonicalization onlinetrainingqld.com.au etc would never be good unless everything about the content is different. Your keywords would be dissolved between each domain and you'd have to employ some pretty rigorous canonicalization [LINK] to prevent harming your search results, not to mention the extra effort of managing multiple domains. Page Depth & Pillar Pages In some search engines the higher the page depth, the more prominence it has, but not in Google [this video] . However, for usability, you might do better if you eliminate the Pillar Page [LINK] location . While Pillar Pages are important for many topics, geo-targeting isn't one of them, not u