: When nesting directories, should parent directory URLs always have content for SEO? For a customer website, I have the following page structure: Home topicgroup 1 topic a topic b topic c topic

@Samaraweera270

There's no SEO issue here, there are just better and worse ways of handling this case as far as SEO is concerned.

Your numerical topicgroups make me think you're either going to use them as categories, or as dead menu links. If you're using them as dead menu links for navigation purposes, and nothing else, you may consider suppressing them from appearing in the URL's, since they won't need to exist as standalone URL's. If you do need them to appear in the URL's after all, make sure to noindex, follow these category pages, to keep them out of the search indexes. Then 301 redirect them to whatever makes the most sense, just make sure they're not linked to anywhere on your website, so that no one (human or bot) can discover them and link to them. Either way, make sure the top level menu items are only there for hierarchy and are not clickable, except to expand the menu options.

Sure, you could put content there, or make them into subcategory aggregator pages, but those pages will be duds, and will serve no purpose, so I would use one of the two options above.

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