which url is better for google SEO, recursively or directly? [duplicate]

which url is better for google SEO, recursively or directly? [duplicate] - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, , to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about which url is better for google SEO, recursively or directly? [duplicate].Problem :

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What is the best file extension for an SEO friendly URL?

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Say I'm building a e-commerce website. I have a lot of products in different categories. For example one of them is:

Flat to Round Power Plug Convertor

So I have two ways to link to this product, directly to it:

http://www.somedomain.com/p/flat-to-round-power-plug-convertor-1005874

or add the categories recursively before it:

http://www.somedomain.com/electrical-tools/plugs-sockets/flat-to-round-power-plug-convertor-1005874

According to google's SEO guild it seems it's recommending to put content in their own folders so that both users and robots can understand them easier. Besides if user simply remove the last part of URL flat-to-round-power-plug-convertor-1005874, they can easily get to the category.

The simply question is, when the product is in a 3rd or 4th level directory, the URL gets pretty long. I don't know if this long URL harms SEO or not. Or should I use the first form?

EDIT: The thing that confuses me is the URL should be "descriptive", and it should be "short". Consider the following example:

http://www.somedomain.com/apparel/women-shoes/lovely-pink-shoes
http://www.somedomain.com/apparel/children-shoes/lovely-pink-shoes

It would definitely help people find what they want. And when you got tens of thousands of products, this situation would happen a lot. Besides, Google definitely encourages to categorize content in their own folders as referenced above. The problem is, the more descriptive the URL is, the longer it is. How should I make choice between "descriptive" and "short"?

Solution :

Long URLs look spammy. If you watch this video from Matt Cutts, you'll see that he talks about how users may be less likely to click on URLs that are too long. In regards to SEO, he says that he doesn't think that there is "much difference" between the two (take from that what you will). From his perspective, it is all about the user experience.

I would go with this url:

http://www.somedomain.com/electrical-tools/plugs-sockets/flat-to-round-power-plug-convertor-1005874

If you just used structured data (breadcrumbs), then you won't have to worry about the URL looking too long in the SERPs, and your click through rate should not be negatively affected.

If the issue about seo, google-search, , is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.