Ecommerce URL's

[s_EOgi_Bear]

I'm a bit divided about the URL structure for ecommerce sites.

I'm using Magento and I have Canonical URLs plugin installed. My question is about the URL structure and length.

1st Way: If I set up Product to have categories in the URL it will appear like this

mysite.com/category/subcategory/product/  - and while the product can be in multiple places , the Canonical URL can be either short or long.

The advantage of having this URL is that it shows all the categories in the breadcrumbs ( and a whole lot more links over the site ) .  The disadvantage is the URL Length

2nd Way: Setting up the product to have no category in the URL

URL will be  mysite.com/product/

Advantage: short URL.  disadvantage - doesn't show the categories in the breadcrumbs if you link direct.

Thoughts?

[WesleySmits]

Personally i prefer to go for the longer url because of the breadcrumbs and the easier url navigation structure. A lot of people delete part of the url to get back to a previous step in the website architecture. Your 1st way allows that to be done fairly easily and the url explains exactly where someone is on the site.
When someone sees your url in the SERP's this would also indicate that they are finding a product in the proper category.

The problem with this is that if the webshop has a product in several categories. I build a female clothing webshop a while back and they had categories for top-wear, bottom-wear, specific clothing articles(blouses, jeans, shoes etc) and for each brand. This meant that a product would be in at least 3 different categories within the site.

For this reason i chose to set the canonical to: http://www.domain.com/product/ in this particular case.

If your webshop does not have this problem and will not get this problem in the future i would recommend the longer url's.

[s_EOgi_Bear]

Yes - Duplicate Content is taken care of with SEO extension ( Canonical URL - you can set it ) I'm inclined to have the full URL in there because

-1 - if it ranks in the SERPs - then the full URL will rank - and you should be able to see the categories as clickable items in the SERPs  and

-2 - When you arrive at the page , you see breadcrumbs as the "how deep I am" and you can click on the next level up ( wheras if you just have the short link it has no "parent" if you know what I mean )

-3 Because the full URL is ranked in the SERPs - the breadcrumbs are links when google crawls the page - so each page carries a bit more link juice to relevant categories.

Make sense?

[abshaw]

You can still use breadcrumbs on the page, either way. Duplicate content and crawlability are the questions here. Could a product appear in multiple categories or just multiple subcategories. If just subcategories, maybe try removing subcategory from the url structure. If it could duplicate across categories use the canonical tags to point to a single version. I think it's better to use the longer structure either way. Look at the best in the business (amazon, etc) and they all use /category/subcategory/product not just /product.

[Highland]

I don't know that it really makes a large difference. Option #1 gives you more keywords in your URL but that's a small benefit and if your category names are large you'll have very long URLs.

I like the conciseness of #2. I'm not really sure how many people are using breadcrumbs. If I had the option, I would have a default breadcrumb added. Most people use their back button instead.
In the end, this is more a personal preference. Do you like the red car or the blue car better?