5 replies to this topic

[clearwat]

Should a new shopping cart be installed in a folder with keyword-rich terms?

i.e. is 'mydomain.com/goodkeywords/' better than 'mydomain.com/catalog' ?

Thank you for your time.

[chrishirst]

It can if that's what you want to do

Nope

[seosurvivor]

Here's where different schools of thought come into play.

If you have the opportunity to do that, do it. It's not a major factor, but any time you can use keyword relevant terms in place of non relevant terms, you should opt for the first.

Is it better? I say Yes.

[Randy]

Is it better? I say Yes.

But only if you link to those pages with the keyworded url as the anchor text.

It's one of those things you should test sometime seosurvivor. As so many of us have done over the years. Last time I tested it there was no effect at all with Google that couldn't be replicated by simple smart use of internal navigation anchor text. Yahoo! at the time was maybe a bit more susceptible, but not enough to make a call for sure that it was the keyworded url instead of a momentary fluke. Certainly not enough to make a huge difference. MSN was just loopy at the time since it was still the early days of them having their own algo.

As Chris said above, sure you can do it since it's a new site. If it makes sense for the real users it's not going to hurt anything, unless you're using mod_rewrite that's slowing down the server to a crawl.

On the other hand don't expect any magical SE benefit from keywording your urls.

[chrishirst]

actually there shouldn't be any "schools of thought" until the OP declares some circumstances where "X" may be better that "Y"

[Jill]

Please see the multitude of threads on  keyword rich file names[/hr].