Google’s Unexpected Take On Site Folder Structure And SEO via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered a question about website category structure in URLs. The context was about a website that offered the same content in multiple languages and the person asking the question wanted to know what was the best way to structure the category URLs.

The main site is in English, representing their primary market.

Their current category structure resembles:

• example.com/blog
• example.com/en-us/blog

and the internationlized versions have category structures like this: site.com/fr-fr/blog

A person asked the following question on Reddit:

“Do we need localized folders with duplicate content for our home market on our site?
Hi all,

I’m familiar with hreflang tags and setting up alternate folders and references for different countries and languages, but I have a specific question for our home market. My client has a large site serving many international clients with localized content, but they’re a US-based company and that’s where the majority of their user base is.

At the moment they have 25+ international localizations across all of their core folders, including a /en-us/ folder for all their main pages.

The issue is, the content on the main site and in these /en-us/ folders is the same, so we’re splitting page authority and creating potential duplicate content issues which (as far as I can see) provide no discernible benefit….

Am I missing anything in my understanding of this?

Is there any specific benefit to the /en-us/ folders we’d be losing?

Are there other considerations or factors I should be thinking about?”

John Mueller’s Answer

Mueller’s answer focused on the impact to analytics and being able to accurately track the different visitors. His answer was indifferent to common SEO concerns like keywords or topical themes for the category names. That in itself is interesting and worth considering.

Here’s his answer:

“I’d generally recommend just one, but this likely isn’t going to make or break your site.

IMO the advantage of using /en-us/blog/ instead of /blog/ for US content (on an internation site that uses /LL-CC/anything URL patterns) is that it’s easier for you to filter & slice your metrics by country/language. I don’t think you’d see a practical SEO difference between using /blog/ or /en-us/blog/ for your US content. /blog/ looks nice, but /en-us/blog/ is also not super-weird.”

Many SEOs are rightfully concerned about the site architecture, with the words used in category folders, with the main concern being if keywords are being used and how that might influence the ability to rank, a concern the Redditor shared.

Mueller’s answer didn’t mention keywords but rather focused on the practical angle of how that will look for analytics. In fact, he said that in this specific case he didn’t expect any kind of SEO difference.

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