Should I display categories in url?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

Hello. I plan to create an information site, I think about the url. In various blogs, you can often see links like site-name.ru/category-name/article-name. But I want to remove the category-name from the url so that all links to publications are of the form site-name.ru/article-name. Will there be any disadvantages from this in terms of seo?

There will be headings (categories) on the site, but I plan to create them with such hub pages, i.e. pages on which links to articles corresponding to the rubric will simply be displayed. At the same time, the link to the article itself will not indicate the heading. Hub: site-name.ru/category-name/ Article: site-name.ru/article-name It seems convenient and clean to me, you can then transfer texts from one category to another, while the url will not contradict the category, in case of replacement.

Answer 1

I did and promoted projects with both URL structures you specified and I can say for sure that I did not notice a big difference in promotion.
Although, search engines "love" the branched structure of a site like "site-name.ru/category-name/article-name", but objectively you will notice this only in an increase in the number of crawl limits (Yandex Webmaster's Office - Indexing - Page Recrawl - Daily Limit ).
But, as you rightly noted for the "site-name.ru/category-name/article-name" variant, one of the minuses is that convenience is lost when articles are "shuffled" between sections.
To successfully promote articles by the option "site-name.ru/article-name":

1. organize linking blocks with m / d articles (for example, according to the classic version - at the end of the article
   
2. set a sidebar widget with new articles - they will be indexed faster and gain positions
   
3. try to place linking blocks with articles or sections (if sections are promoted by requests) on such "trust" pages as "About the project", "About the author", etc. Because most often, these pages gain enormous "weight" due to through links from the Menu, and it should be used.
   

For successful promotion of Sections according to the option "site-name.ru/article-name":

1. when compiling a CL for a site, try to pick up queries to promote sections and optimize these pages for them.
   
2. in sections, in addition to article titles, place preview images + unique (!) Text with a brief description of what the article is about (the text should not be duplicated on other pages!).
   
3. Open pagination pages for indexing, unify meta tags on pagination pages (for example, add "page #" at the end of the text, where "#" changes depending on the serial number of the pagination page. The H1 heading can only be left on the first pagination page, on the rest - put away.
   
4. Sometimes, if you put a frequency request on a section page, you can add a small thematic text after the H1 before the list of articles, containing the words of the subject, highlights and marketing (beneficial to the user).
   

In a nutshell, that's it!)

Answer 2

1. Path should not be empty (purely for adequate reasons), i.e. The page site-name.ru/category-nameshould not lead to 404 or blank.
2. If you follow the logic of the frequency of requests, then the category pages may well become landings for high/mid-frequency.
3. Sometimes generated urls from root (immediately after site-name.ru/) can lead to crashes, as they can be poorly adjusted for uniqueness, or other conflicts in the url manager may arise.

Answer 3

I'm doing the classic site-name.ru/category-name/article-name.html
Sites are excellently ranked, 85% + of keys are in the top 10. Infoseo.
But this is the sum of factors in which the structure of the site is only a small brick.