We are coming to the end of a long project in which we are upgrading our client's site from a custom built CMS to the latest version of Umbraco CMS whilst also making their website responsive. As part of this upgrade process, the URL structure of the site has changed however, we are mainly handling this with 301 redirects so that old redundant links from the old site now link to the new URLs.Last week, our client threw a major spanner in the works by telling us that the 'SEO experts' that he started using on his current site have said the site structure the new Umbraco site uses is unworkable and is also bad for SEO because it has a lot of 'levels'. Their main concern is that their products and services are nested too far down in the tree and that this somehow effects their SEO negatively. I will admit now that I am no SEO expert and consider the whole SEO thing a bit of a black art that seems to change each week so can anyone give me any advice with regards to this as well as evidence in support (preferably from Google themselves).This is where the site currently sits if you wish to take a look:  http://tinyurl.com/umbracourlstructureThe way we have structured the pages is as follows: (1) = Level {X} = Not in Main Navigation(1)->Home  (2)--> Destinations    (3)---> South America [Continent]      (4)----> Argentina [Country] {X}        (5)-----> Buenos Aires [Area] {X}          (6)------> Buenos Aires [City] {X}             (7)-------> Package Product 1 {X}             (7)-------> Package Product 2 {X}             (7)-------> Package Product 3 {X}             (7)-------> Hotel Product 1 {X}             (7)-------> Hotel Product 2 {X}             (7)-------> Hotel Product 3 {X}             (7)-------> Activity Product 1 {X}             (7)-------> Activity Product 2 {X}             (7)-------> Activity Product 3 {X}      (4)----> Bolivia {X}    (3)---> North America [Continent]  (2)--> Holiday Types    (3)---> Cruise    (3)---> Family Holiday  (2)--> Places To Stay {X}  (2)--> Things To Do {X}  (2)--> About Us   Products have actual names on the website but the numbered versions shown above are merely an exampleThe idea is a user can drill down to the destination that they wish to look at right down to a city level to see the products that are available in that specific area.When on a continent page, all of the holiday packages that are descendants of that continent are displayed.If you select a country from the side navigation then these packages are filtered further so that only the ones in that particular country are shown.If you click an area within the country then these are again filtered down further.Regardless of where you access the products their url is as follows:www.example.com/destinations/southamerica/argentina/buenosaires/buenosaires/package-product-1This of course if because of the tree/folder structure that Umbraco follows by default.The problem here is that my client wants the URLS to be:www.example.com/southamerica/argentinaso that they cut out certain pages to make the URLs shorter which I have advised against (mainly because it would involve rewriting the website substantially) .Does anyone have any advise with regards to this and any experience as the whether or not the level of nesting is indeed bad for SEO? My main issue is that it is only now when we are coming to the end of development that they are raising these issues and altering the structure in Umbraco will essentially mean rewriting a lot of the site which we do not really have the time or resources to do.I have done a lot of my own research into the issue and Google's official standpoint on this seems to be that the length of the URL and the 'levels/subdirectories' don't actually make any difference. In fact, Google now advise that structured URLs be used in sites as they help the user to logically navigate through the structure. The only issue that really crops up is when parameters are used in URLs but we handle these using Canonical URLs so this shouldn't be an issue.After discovering these findings, I forwarded the following resources to our client:Keep a simple URL structure:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=enDoes the number of subdirectories in URL affect its ranking?https://youtu.be/l_A1iRY6XTMHowever, they have dismissed both of these resources with the argument that the video is dated 2010 and that Google's practices have probably changed since then.So, can anyone shed any light on this issue and point me in the direction of any more recent statements or guidelines that Google have released that tie into this issue?My aim is to really dismiss the claims made by these 'SEO experts' as so far the evidence I have found from Google directly contradicts their claims and I do not wish to redevelop an almost complete website based upon outdated or incorrect SEO advice / information.
Do shorter URLs benefit the pagerank and overall SEO value of pages vs. a longer categorised url showing the site structure
seo;google;url