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I'm looking for some advice on the URL structure on a growing website, we were a niche site, so our homepage was essentially a hub page of all our sub-categories with a URL structure of 

example.com/sub-cat/

Where as now we are expanding to cover a few niches.

The question is whether we go for:

  1. Keep all example.com/sub-cat/ URLs as they are and just add new example.com/category/ pages for each of the categories, which would link to all our sub-category pages. This would potentially effect the flow through the directories/breadcrumb trail, as the hub page would be disjointed? Does this matter?

  2. Create the hub pages for example.com/category/ and then redirect the sub-category pages across to example.com/category/sub-cat/ which would keep the breadcrumb trail and directory structure more sensible in my mind. It would involve redirects though and a longer URL.

  3. Pretty much the same as 2, though with altered names. Say for example if we previously had carthings.com/car-parts/ we could go carthings.com/car/car-parts/ or carthings.com/car/parts/ - this one would have the key phrase car wheels in one level of the URL so potentially better SEO wise, though it looks slightly more spammy, especially when you consider that in the niches we are in we would have to have a term relating to cars in the next level, for example carthings.com/car/car-parts/car-wheel-trims/.

In my mind, the least spammy one would be carthings.com/car/parts/car-wheel-trims/ but that takes out a key phrase "car parts" and adds an additional level to it.

Hope this makes sense, I couldn't think of a better example for the 3rd one.

I have looked at other questions here trying to find an answer though the ones I could find seem to not quite be the situation we are looking for, and we are particularly keen on trying to rank with our newly introduced hub pages.

unor
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wsjlisseter
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  • See this answer: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/74633/well-structured-urls-vs-urls-optimized-for-seo/74639#74639 – closetnoc Aug 28 '16 at 03:30
  • Also remember that you should not be too repetitive in your URI, for example, car/parts/wheel-trims/, as well, the URI should almost read like a sentence if it can. Why? Because it has the semantic components subject, predicate, and object just like a sentence. It can be analyzed and understood. Repeating car too many times does no good. Why? Because it is actually only counted once since it fits semantically only once. This may help: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/81551/why-would-a-website-with-keyword-stuffing-rank-higher-than-one-without-in-google/81552#81552 – closetnoc Aug 28 '16 at 03:38

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