Keep our category navigation in tree structure but move our URLs to a more flat structure. Good plan?

[DWJames]

In our Magento store, products are arranged into categories, subcategories and so on. We typically have 3 or 4 layers of category depth.

This makes it nice and easy for customers to find stuff, but it means that the end categories have massive long urls.

I'd like to keep our category tree structure in place from a navigation point of view, but I feel the url structure is pushing some important stuff to the back of the shop as it were. We have something like 200 categories in total.

So, assuming every individual category has an a unique name, I'd like to rewrite the urls so that:

ourshop.com/car-parts/
stays as  
ourshop.com/car-parts/

ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/
becomes  
ourshop.com/suspension/

ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/springs
becomes  
ourshop.com/springs/

ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/springs/thismake-lowering-springs
becomes  
ourshop.com/thismake-lowering-springs/

and so on....
I'll need some custom magento URL rewrite  work done, but that's another story. The real question is whether you guys feel this is worthwhile?

Are there any other stores with a deep categorised navigation structure, but a flat url structure?

thanks,

James

[BenRush]

In which case I guess it comes down to how impactful any disruption might be....i.e., how many links do you have built up against your existing URLs?

If there isn't many - then its probably worth taking the jump and re-writing stuff now.

Ben

[DWJames]

Cheers Ben,

I'm not so worried about the mechanics of rewriting the old URLs and keeping them unique as I can have all that covered. fairly easily

I'm more interested in how beneficial the end results may be and whether it's worth a disruption.

cheers,

James

[BenRush]

I prefer flat URL structures, but I would think twice about the effort if my existing URL strings had built up some nice link equity.

When I worked at Premier Farnell for example, we went for flat URL structures without the hierarchy included, i.e., http://uk.farnell.com/d-subminiature rather than http://uk.farnell.com/connectors/d-subminiature

In my current role the URL strings are not great, but its a legacy thing before I started here: http://www.asiarooms.com/en/singapore/singapore/orchard_road.html but the site has strong link equity built up into many of the pages and I am loathed to go through another exercise of updating them and risking loss of business (even if only short term) as I suspect the benefit is probably not worth that cost.

Its a balancing act I guess.

Also, just be careful if you do decide to flatten them that you don't potentially caused duplication. For example, imagine you have duplicate categories called accessories.....you can only have 1 URL called http://ourshop.com/accessories so you might need to add some rules in to handle those correctly.

Ben