Welcome to the Q&A Forum

noone has an opinion or experience?

I have a client on shopify.  All categories have correct canonical links.

however, the links from all menus, category pages, etc. follow this structure:

/collections/COLLECTION_NAME/products/PRODUCT_NAME

but the canonical link on the above product url is:

/products/PRODUCT_NAME

I have a feeling this is hurting our product detail page's seo.  Our collection pages are ranking fine, but for some reason the detail pages aren't.  It could be that they are deeper, but I am trying to make sure nothing big is causing it first before I get into the smaller factors.

Any best practices on this?

I just tested:

blog.hubspot.com

and hubspot.com

both have the same DA in OSE.

I also tested support.hostgator.com and hostgator.com

those have the same DA.

Thanks guys.  I know everyone in our industry is pro sub directories.  I guess what I am looking for is irrefutable case studies / fact.  Have you guys tested this post 2012?  Is there any evidence from 2013 that this is still the case?

So I've read the posts here:

http://moz.com/community/q/subdomain-blog-vs-subfolder-blog-in-2013

and many others, Matt Cutts video, etc.

Does anyone have direct experience that its still best practice to use the sub folder? (hopefully a moz employee can chime in?)

I have a client looking to use hubspot.  They are preaching with the Matt Cutts video.  I'm in charge of SEO / marketing and am at odds with them now.  I'd like to present the client with more info than "in my experience in the past I've seen subdirectories work."

Any help? Articles? etc?

I lost a bunch of backlinks according to my seo moz reports.  I am looking to figure out where they were from.

IS:

www.example.com/catalog/category%/product%

better than

www.example.com/category%/product%

category and product are dynamic values that change with the diff. categ. and products displayed while catalog is constant.