Website Hierarchy Question / Discussion

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hey all,

I am looking to get the opinions off the community to help settle a discussion / debate.

We are looking at how a site is laid out and which is the preferred method. There are two options:

• www.site.com --> /category-page --> /product-page (With this option, you always have the domain name and then page, no matter where in the site you actually are, and how many clicks it took you to get there). Your URL to the end page here would be www.site.com/product-page
• www.site.com --> /category-page --> /category-page/product-page --> (With this option, you into a defined structure). Your URL to the end page here would be www.site.com/category-page/product-page

If you have a moment, I would be interested to know your views on which you would consider to be your preferred method and why.

Thanks,

Andy

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Thanks David & Dana,

So far, this appears to be erring towards the simple URL's.

To address your comment about moving Dana, this is only quite a small site, but I can see the benefits of looking at it in this way.

-Andy

[danatanseo]

I agree with David. There are really arguments for going either way. I would give one edge to this method:

www.site.com/category-page/product-page

The advantage to using this instead of the super simple URLs is when you have a really large complex site and you need to move it to another platform. From an organizational standpoint, and just knowing from looking at your URLs what "lives" where, it's much easier if your URLs echo the structure of your site. Still, there are probably some ways to cope with that too, so depending on your CMS, this might not really be a problem.

[David-Kley]

www.site.com/category-page/product-page

I would prefer this method, because that is what a user would expect, although it can go either way.

Using the bolded method above is better for navigation, as a user and search engine can see how the product relates to the category it placed in. Generally, URL structures like this also include breadcrumbs, allowing for a user to quickly go back to the main category page and begin a new search, if desired. Having simple navagation can increase onsite time, since it's easy to view content and products.

I can also vouch for the other method for a few reasons. Using a shortened URL is more direct, and IMO better for seo. This allows you to set up the top level or category page with anchor text links directed at the subpages or products. When one of those is clicked, the page the user lands on will be the shorter, more direct version, with a clean URL. I think Google likes this method better, as the end URL is more directly related to the product being referenced, without any pollution. (unless you are using markup for breadcrumbs).