Avoid This SEO Mistake with URL Structure

Stop burying high-value topics. Top-level URLs win rankings Top-level pages always rank better for broad, competitive terms because they receive more internal links, backlinks, and crawl priority Landing pages and listicles consistently outperform generic “/tools” index pages because they target clear search intent Child pages under weak, low-traffic parent folders never reach their full ranking potential A thematic URL structure always strengthens rankings by grouping related topics into authoritative category hubs Entity–attribute pairing is the fastest way to build powerful thematic categories that search engines understand Top-level thematic pages like “/ai-avatars” reliably outrank nested structural URLs like “/tools/ai-avatar” Pages with top-level folders dominate because they accumulate stronger link authority and are crawled more often Building subpages under a strong thematic parent maximizes both the parent page’s ranking potential and each child page