Ecommerce product URLs & flat architecture?
-
Hey Mozzers,
I'm optimizing a small ecommerce site. The site URL directory structure seems all good & logical, BUT should I try for a flatter architecture - so that the individual products are at top level after the domain name in URLs?
e.g.
www.domain.com/first-item/
www.domain.com/second-item/
etc. etc.My current setup (I'm using the Woocommerce plugin in Wordpress):
www.domain.com/shop/ (main shop page)
www.domain.com/shop/category-name-1/
www.domain.com/shop/category-name-2/
www.domain.com/shop/category-name-3/with products appearing as:
www.domain.com/product/first-item/
www.domain.com/product/second-item/
etc.I've researched some big brand ecommerce sites and most seem to be domain.com/amazing-product/ even if the product itself is many categories or sub-categories down. i.e. Homepage > Home & Furniture > Furniture > Living Room Furniture > Coffee Tables
As I say the information architecture makes sense from a user point of view, but I'm guessing the individual products would stand more chance of ranking if directly following the domain name? Woocommerce although flexible doesn't seem to do this out-of-the-box, so please some advice before I go on a hacking and URL rewriting mission!
Thanks
-
Thanks Tom,
Oh that's your Amazon store too, good stuff then!
Haha the niche isn't 'cats in bomber jackets', but may as well be lol! As the niche has many EMD's and matching product URL's I'm paying close attention to the competition in the SERP's. Although, as with many things, testing is probably the best way to find out. I'll see how it goes, with the current structure and if I can only get so far maybe try the 'flatter' approach.
thanks again,
Greg
-
Hi Greg,
Small world indeed!
This is just my opinion, but perhaps these bigger stores may be already ranking so high that the need of a department/category/subcategory url is just not required because the SEO is done perfectly elsewhere, I don't know, just a hunch!
The URL's are definitely something to take into consideration, whether the niche is something completely random like bomber jackets for cats or something, no one wants an ugly looking URL and with so many shopping cart CMS' around these days, it's relatively straight forward to set up a whole manner of URL's. I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it though.
Also, the Amazon ranked number 1 link for "Proel Rubber Microphone Holder 22mm - 26mm" is actually our Amazon store too! Hehe. Cheeky
Tom
-
Hi Tom, thanks very much for your answer and posting your store links.. actually you're not a million miles away from my Essex home.. small world huh!
Yes I certainly am a fan of the breadcrumb drilling down and organising by category, and only started thinking differently after watching an old WBF with Rand talking about flat architecture http://vimeo.com/3873783 , (and I think there may have been another with Dr. Pete too). Then I started looking at the big UK stores like M&S, John Lewis, etc. and saw that they use the flat architecture - with individual products directly after the domain name, despite being many categories down: eg. http://www.johnlewis.com/reiss-rathjen-passport-holder/p231880395?colour=Khaki (which ranks #1 for "reiss rathjen passport holder").
It's very interesting to see the URL structure on your site, which is really well organised.. and I like the idea of the short URL by cat no. which must be is handy for customers. Yet I guess you're not trying to actively rank for 'product numbers', and if someone searches for the 'product name' you can "sometimes" be outranked by the competitor's use in URL: e.g. search for "Proel Rubber Microphone Holder 22mm - 26mm" and amazon wins. However for most you win so kudos to you!
Seeing as the site I'm working on only has a few products in a specific niche, maybe I'm over-thinking it.. however it's in a niche with many competing Exact Match Domain's and keyword-matched URL's, so that's why I'm giving it extra thought.
thanks again for your answer. I'll bookmark your site for my next audio needs too
-
not many... about twenty.
-
Hi Greg,
The URL structure for me has always worked best WITH the categories in the URL. In the UK, my company ranks number 1 for "disco speakers". This could be down to the fact that our URL's APPEAK somewhat long, but in fact help us gain much more traffic than it would if we didn't include the categories.
For example, this is for our active PA speakers category:
http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/active-powered-pa-speakers/
It does appear rather long, particularly as there will be a product code after that URL for the actual product page.
But what works well for us, is to keep the URL structure like this on the website (So if you click department >> Categories >> sub categories >> product) but allow people to navigate to the website using just the product code in the url. So http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/active-powered-pa-speakers/PRODUCTCODE just becomes http://www.electromarket.co.uk/PRODUCTCODE.
But yes, in my opinion, keeping the categories in the URL like a sort of "breadcrumb" has always worked best for us and we're using Magento Enterprise.
Hope this is of some help!
Tom
-
How many products do you currently have?
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
-
410 or 301 after URL update?
Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Consolidate URLs on Wordpress?
Hi Guys, On a WordPress site, we are working with currently has multiple different versions of each URL per page. See screenshot: https://d.pr/i/ZC8bZt Data example: https://tinyurl.com/y8suzh6c Right now the non-https version redirects to the equivalent https versions while some of the https versions don't redirect and are status code 200. We all want all of them to redirect to the highlighted blue version (row a).Is this easily doable in wordpress and how would one go about it? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickstar1 -
How much does URLs with CAPS and URLs with non-CAPS existing on an IIS site matter nowadays?
I work on a couple ecommerce sites that are on IIS. Both sites have return a 200 header status for the CAPS and non CAPS version of the URLs. While I suppose it would be ok if the canonicals pointed to the same version of the page, in some cases it doesn't (ie; /Home-Office canonicalizes to itself and /home-office canonicalizes to itself). I came across this article (http://www.searchdiscovery.com/blog/case-sensitive-urls-and-seo-case-matters/) that is a few years old and I'm wondering how much of an issue it is and how I would determine if it is/isn't?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OfficeFurn0 -
Short Url vs Medium Urls ?
Hello Moooooooooooz ! I got a SEO fight today and though the best would be to involve more people into the fight ! 😛 Do you think it's better to get A- company.com/services/service1.html or B- company/service1.html I was for A as services is also googled to find the service1. I also think that it's better to help google to understand where the service is on the website My friend was for B as URL has to stay as short as possible What do you think ? ps: I can create the URL I want using Joomla and Sh404. The websites has 4 different categoies: /about, /services/ products, /projects Tks ! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AymanH0 -
Two homepage urls
We have two different homepages for our website. One is designed for daytime users (i.e. businesses), whereas the second night version is designed with home consumers in mind. Is this hurting our SEO by having two homepage urls, instead of just building a strong presence around one? We have set up canonical meta on each one: On the night version: domain.com/indexnight.html we have a On the day version: domain.com/index.html we have a It seems to me that we should just choose one of them and set up a permanent 301 redirect from one to the other. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessieT0 -
How long until my correct url is in the serps?
We changed our website including urls. We setup 301 redirects for our pages. Some of the pages show up as the old url and some the new url. When does that change?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Google News URL Structure
Hi there folks I am looking for some guidance on Google News URLs. We are restructuring the site. A main traffic driver will be the traffic we get from Google News. Most large publishers use: www.site.com/news/12345/this-is-the-title/ Others use www.example.com/news/celebrity/12345/this-is-the-title/ etc. www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ www.example.com/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ (Celebrity is a channel on Google News so should we try and follow that format?) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title/12345/ www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title-12345/ (unique ID no at the end and part of the title URL) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ Others include the date. So as you can see there are so many combinations and there doesnt seem to be any unity across news sites for this format. Have you any advice on how to structure these URLs? Particularly if we want to been seen as an authority on the following topics: fashion, hair, beauty, and celebrity news - in particular "celebrity name" So should the celebrity news section be www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ or what? This is for a completely new site build. Thanks Barry
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deepti_C0 -
Magento: URLs for Products in Multiple Categories
I am working in Magento to build out a large e-commerce site with several thousand products. It's a great platform, but I have run into the issue of what it does to URLs when you put a product into multiple categories. Basically, "a book" in two categories would make two URLs for one product: 1) /books/a-book 2) author-name/a-book So, I need to come up with a solution for this. It seems I have two options: Found this from a Magento SEO article: 'Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL's. Because Magento doesn't support this functionality very well - it creates duplicate content issues - it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set "Use categories path for product URL's to "no".' This would solve the issues and be a quick fix, but I think it's a double edged sword, because then we lose the SEO value of our well named categories being in the URL. Use Canonical tags. To be fair, I'm not even sure this is possible. Even though it is creating different URLs and, thus, poses a risk of "duplicate content" being crawled, there really is only one page on the admin side. So, I can't go to all of the "duplicate" pages and put a canonical tag, because those duplicate pages don't really exist on the back-end. Does that make sense? After typing this out, it seems like the best thing to do probably will be to just turn off categories in the URL from the admin side. However, I'd still love any input from the community on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0