Length and level of URL

Hi,

I have a problem to solve with changing the current URLs on my site to some better ones.

The dilemna I'm experiencing now, is that the URL on my site (parfume e-commerce site) now is for example:
example.com/giorgio-armani/for-men/attitude/1427-attitude-edt/, sometimes the url gets even longer.

What I wanna do is change this url to this:
example.com/giorgio-armani-attitude-edt.html

I will do it for all brands and basically change the number of slashes - lower the number of levels.

Will this change in the URL help me in terms of on-page SEO?

Also, is the KW "for-men" even necessary in the URL?

Thanks alot for every answer

No, not unless we are talking about a very very long URL which might get clipped.
At the end of a day, no matter what the URL, if it can be followed and it returns correct mark up language it will be treated exactly the same.
There is a minor sway to that with the keyword dnesity in the URL but this is a very very minor factor and not worth condiering.


That depends wheterh or not you are targetting a keyword with for men in it. As the product is probably searched as mens perfume I would suggest that you have that in it.
Better yet - do some thorough keyword research and make sure you are targetting what people are searching for, rather than hoping your page fits what people are searching for.

Thanks a lot for that.

What bothers me a bit is the KW density in the URL, eg:
http://www.example.com/pierre-cardin/for-men/pierre-cardin/1969-pierre-cardin-edc/

would this have a bit of a negative effect, or would Google consider it ok? The phrase pierre cardin is repeated 3times in the URL, which seems to be way too many.

I think that will be fine, the Keyword density in the URL is a very very minor factor, it would be best if you only had the manufacturer in the URL once.

Arguably, it does help ever so slightly to have the manufactuer in the URL, after all if the URL describes the page it makes sense.

In practical terms for any competetive market you will not notice this so it makes more sense to write concise user friendly URLs, maybe just the manufactuer, generic product name and a product number

eg. domain.com/pierre-cardin/1969

Its not worth losing too much sleep over this though. If the URLs are indexed I wouldn't worry much more about it.

Some great advice by tstolber there.

As a side note, if you are going to redirect all the URLs, make sure you 301 all the old ones to the new ones, so you don't lose any link juice.

Thanks alot for the advice. Now I feel much better, and got it off my chest.