Keep our category navigation in tree structure but move our URLs to a more flat structure. Good plan?
-
In our Magento store, products are arranged into categories, subcategories and so on. We typically have 3 or 4 layers of category depth.
This makes it nice and easy for customers to find stuff, but it means that the end categories have massive long urls.
I'd like to keep our category tree structure in place from a navigation point of view, but I feel the url structure is pushing some important stuff to the back of the shop as it were. We have something like 200 categories in total.
So, assuming every individual category has an a unique name, I'd like to rewrite the urls so that:
ourshop.com/car-parts/
stays as
ourshop.com/car-parts/ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/
becomes
ourshop.com/suspension/ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/springs
becomes
ourshop.com/springs/ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/springs/thismake-lowering-springs
becomes
ourshop.com/thismake-lowering-springs/and so on....
I'll need some custom magento URL rewrite work done, but that's another story. The real question is whether you guys feel this is worthwhile?Are there any other stores with a deep categorised navigation structure, but a flat url structure?
thanks,
James
-
In which case I guess it comes down to how impactful any disruption might be....i.e., how many links do you have built up against your existing URLs?
If there isn't many - then its probably worth taking the jump and re-writing stuff now.
Ben
-
Cheers Ben,
I'm not so worried about the mechanics of rewriting the old URLs and keeping them unique as I can have all that covered. fairly easily
I'm more interested in how beneficial the end results may be and whether it's worth a disruption.
cheers,
James
-
I prefer flat URL structures, but I would think twice about the effort if my existing URL strings had built up some nice link equity.
When I worked at Premier Farnell for example, we went for flat URL structures without the hierarchy included, i.e., http://uk.farnell.com/d-subminiature rather than http://uk.farnell.com/connectors/d-subminiature
In my current role the URL strings are not great, but its a legacy thing before I started here: http://www.asiarooms.com/en/singapore/singapore/orchard_road.html but the site has strong link equity built up into many of the pages and I am loathed to go through another exercise of updating them and risking loss of business (even if only short term) as I suspect the benefit is probably not worth that cost.
Its a balancing act I guess.
Also, just be careful if you do decide to flatten them that you don't potentially caused duplication. For example, imagine you have duplicate categories called accessories.....you can only have 1 URL called http://ourshop.com/accessories so you might need to add some rules in to handle those correctly.
Ben
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Anyone know the benefit of URLs being in the target language?
For example, a page targeting the spanish language, does it make a difference if the URL is site.com/i-don't-speak-spanish vs site.com/no-habla-espanol
On-Page Optimization | | LennyO0 -
Is using hyphens in a URL to separate words good practice?
Hi guys, I have a client who wants to use a hyphen to separate two words in the URL to make each work stand out. Is is good or bad practice to use a hyphen in a URL and will it affect rankings? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | StoryScout0 -
Category page canonical tag
I know this question has been asked a few times on here but I'm looking for very specific advice. Currently when you go to a category, say http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html, a canonical tag is added to the head of the page. There are plenty of "variant" pages which carry the same tag, for example: /range.html?p=2
On-Page Optimization | | crichardson9
/range.html?p=3
/range.html?dir=asc&order=price
/range.html?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price Is it wise to push the "link juice" for each of these variant pages to the top level page? Or should each variant page have its own unique canonical tag? After reading many blog posts, guides and papers I'm truly confused! Any general guidance or recommendations would be much appreciated. Chris.1 -
Duplicated Products on Homepage and category pages
I have some of my best sellers located on the homepage of my websites. These same products may also appear on the category page as well. On the home page and the category page, the product title, short description, thumbnail, etc. are exact duplicates and I am afraid this is hurting me. I would appreciate any advice you may have on how to deal with this issue. These are some of my best sellers and most often, the homepage will outrank the category page for the product. Thanks in advance, lordhenry
On-Page Optimization | | jake3720 -
On Page Reports - Multiple URLs Appearing for a Keyword
Hello, I have a question regarding the on page reports automatically generated by seomoz When I look at my on page reports I notice that each keyword appears a number of times, each with a different url and then a grade for the on page report and sometimes a rank. I'm not sure I understand this, firstly I thought the on page reports were only generated for keywords in the top 50, does that mean the global top 50, or my top 50? Also why are they appearing for so many urls, I find this confusing and am not sure which pages to focus on improving, it's not always my intended pages that are ranking the best. I believe that I read somewhere that I can choose which pages to have the on page reports rank for, perhaps this is the solution? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks, Iain
On-Page Optimization | | jannkuzel0 -
Close URL owned by competitors.
The following example is exactly analogous to our situation (site names slightly altered😞 We own www.business-skills.com. It's our main site. We don't own, and would rather avoid paying for, www.businessskills.com. It's a parked domain and the owners want a very large sum for it. We own www.business-skills.co.uk and point it to our main site. We don't own www.businessskills.co.uk. This is owned by our biggest competitor. We also own www.[ourbrand].com and .co.uk, and point them to the main site. My question is - how much traffic do you think we may be missing due to these nearly-but-not-quite URL matches? Does it matter in terms of lost revenue? What sort of things should I be looking at to get a very rough estimate?
On-Page Optimization | | JacobFunnell0 -
Absolute vs relative urls
Hello, Should absolute or relative urls to be used for the internal links? I heard mixed opinions on that: One source claims that web crawlers prefer absolute urls as they are more understandable Other source points that there is no difference for web crawlers what urls are used and relative urls are shorter which reduces the size of a page. Which option is recommended? Many thanks Darius
On-Page Optimization | | LinenMe0