Product URL structure for a marketplace model

[LiamPatterson]

Hello All.

I run an online marketplace start-up that has around 10000 products listed from around 1000+ sellers. We are a similar model to etsy/ebay in the sense that we provide a platform but sellers to list products and sell them.

I have a URL structure question.

I have read http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-define-best-url-structure-for-product-pages which seems to show everyone suggests to use

Products: products/category/product-name

Categories: products/category

as the structure for product pages.

Because we are a marketplace (our category structure has multiple tiers sometimes up to 3) our sellers choose a category for products to go in.

How we have handled this before is we have used:

Products: products/last-tier-category-chosen/product-name (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks/fluffy-marshmallows)

Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks)

However we have two issues with this:

1. The categories can sometimes change, or users can change them which means the links completely change and undo any link building work built up.
2. The urls can get a bit long and am worried that the most important data (the fluffy marshmallow that reflects in the page title and content) is left till too late in the URL.

As a result we plan to change our URL structure (we are going through a rebuild anyhow so losing old links is not an issue here) so that the new structure was:

Products: products/product-name(eg: /products/fluffy-marshmallows)

Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks)

My concern about doing this however, and question here, is whether this willnegatively impact the "structure" of pages when google crawls our marketplace.Because "fluffy marshmallows" will no longer technically fit into the url structure of "sweets and snacks". I dont know if this would have a negative impact or not.

FYI etsy (one of the largest marketplace models in the world) us the latter approach and do not have categories in product urls, eg:

listing/42003836/vintage-french-industrial-inspired-side

Any ideas on this? Many thanks!

[LiamPatterson]

Anyone else have any opinions on this?

[LiamPatterson]

Hey oleg. Thanks for this sounds encouraging. Re unique urls, this isnt an issue as A) the category list is limited and is controlled by us not our members B) we will have validation in place to stop categories having the same name as poducts (this geta validator during the product upload process) so cats and products having the same name wont happen. 3) we wont be using id slugs all all product names (again validated on upload) will be unique. Its a slightly seperate issue really though, for the sake of this post would be good to get some more opinions on whether that more flat structure would get a more positive outcome due to the category/product heierarchy being clearer?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

You should be fine SEO/crawler wise. The most common & recommended structure for wordpress blogs is to just display the post title without the category in the url (i.e. site.com/post-title/) while the category pages are site.com/c/cat-title.

More than anything, you might have trouble your own site/script to differentiate categories from products if you use the same url structure (what page would you mod_rewrite to? would you have to process all category AND product slugs?) - that's the reason for the /42003836/ part of the link you mentioned. Unless you have limited categories, it might get complicated.