I've been working on a site that provides admissions analytics for Canadian universities. Currently my URL structure is straightforward: [sitename].ca/[university-name]/[program-name] - e.g., [sitename].ca/western-university/computer-science. I'm considering adding a /universities/ folder to make it [sitename].ca/universities/western-university/computer-science.
My reasoning is that it might help crawlers understand the parent-child relationship and improve topical clustering. It would also make my codebase a bit cleaner. But the downside is a ton of 301 redirects and potential short-term ranking loss.
I've seen conflicting takes: some say folder names do help with semantic understanding, others argue that URL structure is a very weak signal - Google doesn't really "understand" content from the path, and document names carry much more weight for relevancy. Another colleague pointed out that the redirect hit might be worth it if the site isn't huge yet, but if it's established, the risk isn't justified.
Given that the site has moderate authority (maybe a few hundred pages), I'm leaning toward not changing - the SEO cost likely outweighs the marginal structural benefit. But I'm curious if anyone here has seen concrete evidence that adding a subfolder improved indexing or ranking for a similar niche. Would love to hear experiences, especially from folks who've done this mid-flight.
