Can an SEO 'expert' shed some light on this please.

Which is best for SEO purposes or doesn't it really matter?

1) domain.com/categoryName/product.html

or

2) domain.com/product.html (notice no category included).

3) domain.com/productName (notice no extension).

I'm not an expert - wont stop me having an opinion.... :-)

A year ago I would have said the 'correct' answer was option 1, Category being very important (extra keywords).

These days however, Google especially is very quick to get wise to seo-urls and schemes and time is much better spent making an informative page about the product you are trying to sell.
In the same way Google have developed ways of auto-detecting the overuse of keywords in paragraphs created by SEO companies - it uses this technlogy to work out out overuse of keywords in URLS - So beware use of the SEO mod.

I have three cubecart stores of my own and a few that I have sold/Developed for others. All do fairly well with Search engines - the better ones are those that have NO SEO enabled/mod installed and just get submitted to google base regularly....
I do no other marketing and appear on first page of Google for all my key terms .

ps. love the cat - always makes me smile...

Thanks for the reply It seems to be the general consenus on other forums too and i did think that the extra key words in the category title would make a difference.

Now i know it doesnt i'll just do a redirect from old links to new ones so i dont lose my current PR and positions.

The cat is kewl! Found in on the puter and must have been my wife's

Make sure those redirects are 301 permanent redirects rather than meta refresh tags - It will speed up transition process and ensure that you do not upset engines who consider other types of redirect a black hat no no....

my husbands got a dancing peekachoo - but thats an entirely different story!

I'll do that, thanks


Waaaaaay too much information

Forum affairs will be strictly moderated!

I agree with Sherie, content is king, and I think the SEO URLs simply clean things up a little. To be honest, I haven't seen a major search engine that penalises .php extensions, or extensions with variables! I'm sure some would disagree and probably tell me that it affects the scoring, so back to the first point - Content is king!

I recently purchased a book called "Googlepedia" and it is a nice and basic explanation of SEO.
Seems PR, sitemaps, articles, blogs and content yes are more essential then the URL.
I have had several SEO companies suggest I create clean URL's with just the site name then the product, vs. the present ones www.website/store/cat16_product name.php (I have some lengthy hard to memorize ones for sure) but overall said better for visitors to remember the page not just for SEO. At present I am submitting to link directories, submitting my sitemap, verifying the site with google and hopefully just improving content is next. If what you sell many sell, then basically linking to quality ranked sites with similar content/products is key over URL's, or so I read, does anyone disagree?
I am new to this and having a hard time but sharing what I now know, not much!

Hi,

According to me the 1st option is the best as it would be helpful and useful from the user point of view as well as the SE point of view.

Thanks

@George Pinto
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