: URL paths and their effect on SEO We are developing a website where there will be two distinct types of content: galleries and photos. It makes little sense to use URL paths like /gallery/photo

@Welton855

URLs are URLs - it doesn't really matter how they're structured for search engines. The main element I would recommend working on is to make sure that your images (and the pages they're on) are as much as possible on a single URL, so that you don't have /gallery1/image124 and /gallery3/image124 with the same image on them. Depending on how you build your site, that might be hard, so at the very least I would recommend working to have one chosen preferred URL for them and using something like the rel=canonical link element to point to it ( googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html ).

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@Cofer257

No, it shouldn't matter if you have thousands of pages at the same "level". I've seen sites that have all their content at the root level because they are under the impression it makes a big difference for SEO. (Incidentally the sites do rank well but I don't think the lack of organization has any bearing on that.)

I think the structure you are proposing is good, if I have it correctly:


A set of category pages at /galleries/rabbits
All image landing pages appearing to be in one folder like /photos/bunny1


A good alternative would be to have a main category along with the other categories/tags. You get the added benefit of an extra keyword in the URL, plus it may be easier for users to understand the site structure.

With the above example, "bunny1" might be under the "rabbits" and "fluffy" categories but the main category would be "rabbits". You might then have this structure:


Category pages of /gallery/rabbits/ and /gallery/fluffy/, both showing the "bunny1" image.
Image page of /gallery/rabbits/bunny1

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