URL structure for a product that belongs to several categories

[Mat_C]

Hi,

We are setting up the URL structure for a big webshop and this raised the following questions regarding the URL's for products that belong to several categories (most of the products do, so the same approach would be used for products that just belong to one category). There are three options in my point of view:

• Use root-level product page URLs (limits trackability in Analytics software because you can not specify on product types)
  URL: example.com/product-1/
• Use product type URL directories for all products (which at least offers minimum trackability of all separate product types in Analytics software)
  URL: example.com/book/product-1/
• Use product URLs built upon category URL structures, but ensure that each product page URL has a single, designated canonical URL.
  URL: example.com/category-A/product-1/ with canonical= example.com/category-A/product-1/ URL: example.com/category-B/product-1/ with canonical= example.com/category-A/product-1/

Which option is the preferred one?

Thanks!

[seoelevated]

Each of your options has pros/cons. But in general, I've found that it is detrimental to have to change/redirect product URLs over time, which tends to happen with URLs containing category names and structure. Your second option, where you use a product "type" might be stable enough to avoid this issue though. If it is stable (or if your product pages are short-lived anyway, such as fast fashion merchandise), then I like this second option because it is helpful in analytics as well as SEO.

That said, the 2 main downsides of having the product type in the path for analytics are products which don't fall cleanly in only one "type" or if the types ever change. Then you have issues in analytics trying to compare to prior periods.

A compromise option (not one of your 3) which is often employed is to embed the relevant "type" and "category" keywords into the product name itself. So, in your book example, instead of /product/books/by-author/john-doe/my-life.html, you might instead just have /product/books-biographies-john-doe-my-life.html.

This 4th option isn't as easily parsed by either search engines or analytics, but it performs pretty well in SEO, and if you are consistent in your naming, it can be usable for analytics (you might have to rely on "contains" filters and things like that). Many e-commerce platforms allow you to put these keywords in as a "slug", so that if the product ID has to be at the end of the file path, then it would be like /product/books-biographies-john-doe-my-life/p-1234.html.