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@tjrobertson52 source record

Google manually demotes exact match domains but they STILL work 😅 Here's what actually matters for URL SEO #SEO #GoogleRanking #SEOTips #DigitalMarketing

2025-09-29published
tiktokplatform
3public insights

Topics Mentioned

Public Evidence Excerpt

I wanna talk about how your URL affects your ranking in Google and I will also touch on how it affects it in AI cause it is a little bit different in large language models like ChatGPT. I'm often asked about the ideal subfolder structure or whether or not it matters if you have keywords in your URL. So let's talk about each of those. Despite what Google has said, having keywords in your URL can help you rank for those terms now. It's not gonna help nearly as much as having those words in the H1 of your page, which is the title or the meta title of your page, but it does help. It helps enough that Google has to manually flag exact match domains. If you don't know. An exact match domain is where the domain name is the word that you're trying to rank for. So if you are a window tinting shop in Houston, you might buy the domain window tinting Houston dot com this used to be incredibly effect

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Related Passages

I wanna talk about how your URL affects your ranking in Google and I will also touch on how it affects it in AI cause it is a little bit different in large language models like ChatGPT. I'm often asked about the ideal subfolder structure or whether or not it matters if you have keywords in your URL. So let's talk about each of those. Despite what Google has said, having keywords in your URL can help you rank for those terms now. It's not gonna help nearly as much as having those words in the H1 of your page, whi...
ked if and when subfolders should be used. If you're not familiar with subfolders, this would be like if you had a blog post under your domain slash blog slash post name. The slash blog would be the subfolder. Now, because you're probably not trying to rank for the word blog, it would usually be better to have the category name as the subfolder, but this really isn't that important. In fact, if you only take away one thing from this video, it should be this don't change your URLs. Once your page has been indexed...
But if all pages are at the top level, then no page is important. So my advice is, if you're trying to rank a page for a competitive term, don't put it inside more than one folder. Subfolders can also help you distinguish different types of content or different intents of content on your website. Google will treat each folder as a section of your website, and so if you have different content that speaks to different audiences, it can be useful to separate those by subfolders. Now let's talk about AI like ChatGPT...

Public Insight Cards

Keywords in URLs can help ranking, but less than H1/meta title, and changing existing indexed URLs is usually not worth the authority/trust loss.

URL keywords / SEO · asserts

ked if and when subfolders should be used. If you're not familiar with subfolders, this would be like if you had a blog post under your domain slash blog slash post name. The slash blog would be the subfolder. Now, because you're probably not trying to rank for the word blog, it would usually be better to have the category name as the subfolder, but this...

Open

The video claims ChatGPT pays close attention to title, URL, and meta description before deciding whether to inspect page content.

URL structure / AI visibility · asserts

But if all pages are at the top level, then no page is important. So my advice is, if you're trying to rank a page for a competitive term, don't put it inside more than one folder. Subfolders can also help you distinguish different types of content or different intents of content on your website. Google will treat each folder as a section of your website,...

Open

Google may treat deeply nested pages as lower priority; competitive pages should not be buried under multiple subfolders.

Site architecture · asserts

ked if and when subfolders should be used. If you're not familiar with subfolders, this would be like if you had a blog post under your domain slash blog slash post name. The slash blog would be the subfolder. Now, because you're probably not trying to rank for the word blog, it would usually be better to have the category name as the subfolder, but this...

Open