Ask HN: Repeat or not keywords in URL for better SEO?

I think you'd be better off with

howto.com/how-to-drink

I can't imagine the search engines giving you a boost because you've repeated keywords in the link.

I would be more concerned about how you'll get anyone to link to your articles.

One thing I would add is I'm not sure how great search engines are at decoding domain names into keywords. I mean some search engines might understand howto.com would relate to the keywords "how to" but some might just read it as "howto".

Because of that I'd say go for howto.com/how-to-drink.

It probably makes very very little difference in terms of ranking. In terms of click-through, it probably makes more of a difference.. as long as you have a friendly URL that looks clean, and has the keyword.

So you want /how-to-drink, NOT /article/123131 and definitely not /sasdabasd2312121.asp

Best would an Exact Match Domain (EMD): howtodrink.com. But if your site is going to be about more than just drinking then its probably not recommended.

1. howto.com/how-to-drink 2. howto.com/drink

Number 1 will greatly out perform number 2 for the term 'how to drink'.

I have not seen repeating the keyword in the root and path have a negative effect on seo.

Make 'How To Drink' the first three words of the <title> tag and you're making a strong start.

I'd use: - howto.com/drink URL for category related to all drink-related articles, with anchor-rich links to other articles

- howto.com/how-to-drink for specific article on how to drink.

Gleb