While it is commonly accepted that the shorter the URLs, better for SEO, in a recent Hangout, John Mueller said that the most important thing for GoogleBot was to be able to easily find a page in the structure.
The traditional Google Webmasters hangout presented by John Mueller is often an interesting source of information for SEO professionals.
During a recent hangout, John Mueller answered a question from a merchant who was wondering how it was best to structure his site knowing that he had two separate stores with two separate systems. In his question, he asked John Mueller if it was better to connect his two stores directly from his home page or if he had to map them from a “store” page, thus adding a level of depth to the rest of his site. .
In his response, John Mueller insisted that the structure of the URL did not matter much to Google and that the search engine did not count the number of bars “/” present in URLs. Therefore, the fact that a URL is composed of many directories (e.g. mysite.com/category1/category2/product) does not have any negative impact on the good reference of the latter.
On the contrary, John Mueller said that what mattered most to Google was the depth level of important pages. So, if it is difficult for GoogleBot to access a page, understand, if the number of clicks to reach it from the home page is important (e.g. > 5), then Google might give less importance to this page .
By contrast, If a page is accessible from the home page, Google will tend to consider it more important.
If this intervention does not teach us anything new, except to confirm that the depth of important pages should be limited as much as possible, it is interesting to note that Google increasingly insists on its interventions. Regarding the optimization of internal links and the structure of the sites, as if this criterion became increasingly important in the eyes of the search engine…
