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
-
Multiple Ecommerce sites, same products
We are a large catalog company with thousands of products across 2 different domains. Google clearly knows that the sites are connected. Both domains are fairly well known brands - thousands of branded searches for each site per month. Roughly half of our products overlap - they appear on both sites. We have a known duplicate content issue - both sites having exactly the same product descriptions, and we are working on it. We've seen that when a product has different content on the 2 sites, frequently, both pages get to page 2 of the SERPs, but that's as far as it goes, despite aggressive white hat link building tactics. 1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites? (I think I know the answer...) 2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Product Pages & Panda 4.0
Greeting MOZ Community: I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Of the 600 pages, about 350 of the URLs are product pages, written about specific listings. The content on these pages is quite short, sometimes only 20 words. My ranking has dropped very much since mid-May, around the time of the new Panda update. I suspect it has something to do with the very short product pages, the 350 listing pages. What is the best way to deal with these pages so as to recover ranking. I am considering these options: 1. Setting them to "no-index". But I am concerned that removing product pages is sending the wrong message to Google. 2. Enhancing the content and making certain that each page has at least 150-200 words. Re-writing 350 listings would be a real project, but if necessary to recover I will bite the bullet. What is the best way to address this issue? I am very surprised that Google does not understand that product URLs can be very brief and yet have useful content. Information about a potential office rental that lists location, size, price per square foot is valuable to the visitor but can be very brief. Especially listings that change frequently. So I am surprised by the penalty. Would I be better off not having separate URLs for the listings, and for instance adding them as posts within building pages? Is having separate URLs for product pages with minimal content a bad idea from an SEO perspective? Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can recover from this latest Panda penalty? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Canonical URL Tag
I have 3 websites with same content, I want to add Canonical tag to my main website. Is this also important to mentioned other duplicate URL in canonical tag in main website? or just need to just add
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
1 Ecommerce site for several product segments or 1 Ecommerce site for each product segment ?
I am currently struggling with the decision whether to create individual ecommerce sites for each of 3 consumer product segments or rather to integrate them all under one umbrella domain. Obviously integration under 1 domain makes link building easier, but I am not sure how far google will favor in rankings websites focussed on one topic=product segment. Product segments are medium competitive.Product segments are not directly related but there may be some overlap in customer demographics- Any thoughts ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
Page URL keywords
Hello everybody, I've read that it's important to put your keywords at the front of your page title, meta tag etc, but my question is about the page url. Say my target keywords are exotic, soap, natural, and organic. Will placing the keywords further behind the URL address affect the SEO ranking? If that's the case what's the first n number of words Google considers? For example, www.splendidshop.com/gift-set-organic-soap vs www.splendidshop.com/organic-soap-gift-set Will the first be any less effective than the second one simply because the keywords are placed behind?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0 -
Adding a huge new product range to eCommerce site and worried about Duplicate Content
Hey all, We currently run a large eCommerce site that has around 5000 pages of content and ranks quite strongly for a lot of key search terms. We have just recently finalised a business agreement to incorporate a new product line that compliments our existing catalogue, but I am concerned about dumping this huge amount of content (that is sourced via an API) onto our site and the effect it might have dragging us down for our existing type of product. In regards to the best way to handle it, we are looking at a few ideas and wondered what SEOMoz thought was the best. Some approaches we are tossing around include: making each page point to the original API the data comes from as the canonical source (not ideal as I don't want to pass link juice from our site to theirs) adding "noindex" to all the new pages so Google simply ignores them and hoping we get side sales onto our existing product instead of trying to rank as the new range is highly competitive (again not ideal as we would like to get whatever organic traffic we can) manually rewriting each and every new product page's descriptions, tags etc. (a huge undertaking in terms of working hours given it will be around 4,400 new items added to our catalogue). Currently the industry standard seems to just be to pull the text from the API and leave it, but doing exact text searches shows that there are literally hundreds of other sites using the exact same duplicate content... I would like to persuade higher management to invest the time into rewriting each individual page but it would be a huge task and be difficult to maintain as changes continually happen. Sorry for the wordy post but this is a big decision that potentially has drastic effects on our business as the vast majority of it is conducted online. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExperienceOz0 -
Google Freshness Update & Ecommerce Site Strategies
Just curious what other ecommerce SEO's are doing to battle fresh content. We've been having our clients work on internal blogs, adding articles one click away from landing pages, and implement product reviews when possible but I don't know that it's enough. Our bigger customers have landing pages (usually category pages) with very competitive keywords. So my main issue is what to do with fresh content on category pages.. I've toyed with the idea of having the landing page content re written every now and then. We used to use a blog parser to bring snippits of comments from the blog into landing pages but I believe that to be a problem with duplicate content. News snippits from other sites don't seem beneficial either. Anyone have any other ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
How to Resolve Duplication of HTTPS & HTPP URLs?
Right now, I am working on eCommerce website. [Lamps Lighting and More] I can find out both URLs in website as follow. HTTP Version: http://www.lampslightingandmore.com/ HTTPS Version: https://www.lampslightingandmore.com/ I have check one of my competitor who has implemented following canonical on both pages. Please, view source code for both URLs. http://www.wayfair.com ** https://www.wayfair.com** Then, I checked similar thing in SEOmoz website. 🙂 Why should I not check in SEOmoz because, They are providing best SEO information so may be using best practice to deal with HTTPS & HTTP. LOL I tried to load following URL so it redirect to home page. https://www.seomoz.org is redirecting to http://www.seomoz.org But, following URL is not redirecting any where as well as not set canonical over there. https://www.seomoz.org/users/settings I can find out following code on http://www.seomoz.org/robots.txt **User-agent: *** ** Disallow: /api/user?*** So, I am quite confuse to solve issue. Which one is best 301 redirect or canonical tag? If any live example to see so that's good for me and make me more confident.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0