Keep our category navigation in tree structure but move our URLs to a more flat structure. Good plan?
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
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
-
FAQ page structure
I have read in other discussions that having all questions on an FAQ page is the way to go and then if the question has an answer worthy of its own page, you should abbreviate the answer and link to the page with more content. My question is when using some templates in WP, they have a little + button you can click and it reveal the answer to the question. Does this hurt SEO versus having all text visible and then using headers/subheaders? An example of the + button https://fyrfyret.dk/faq/
On-Page Optimization | | OrlandSEO1 -
URL Path. What is better for SEO
Hello Moz people, Is it better for SEO to have a URL path like this: flowersite.com/anniversary_flowers/dozen_roses OR flowersite.com/dozen_roses Is it better to have the full trail of pages in the URL?
On-Page Optimization | | CKerr0 -
Moving/deleting blog
I have a website with a blog attached to it. It is a wordpress blog which we have not updated since 2013. However, it has a lot of pages going back to 2010. I am moving my website to weebly so I can't move my blog over. I could recreate all the posts and make redirects to the new url. However, the posts are old and outdated so it doesn't really make sense, aside from seo. I need advice. Would I take an seo hit if i start over with a blog and leave the old posts behind? Thanks!!!
On-Page Optimization | | bhsiao0 -
Link Structure
On my site I have a dropdown menu going across the page at the top to all of my categories on each page, I also have a similar structure going down the side going to the same categories, is this acceptable or would Google count this as double the internal links?
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
Is .PW domain is good for SEO?
I want to register .PW domain which has recently got live to register. I am in doubt should it is good for SEO or not.
On-Page Optimization | | semmediapvtltd0 -
Google Maps API as primary navigation
Is it okay for SEO to have a google maps api as the primary source of navigation? For example, have people find locations on a map instead of links to them. I'm wondering how/if Google views this method, kinda like how Google can't read images. Will Google realize that these pages are linked to from the homepage gmaps API?
On-Page Optimization | | terran0 -
Ecommerce Product Subcategory URL
Our website has 5 main categories displayed in tabs in the header. The main landing page of each of the 5 categories is a paginated page (3pages- set up with canonical tags to avoid duplicate content) with a side bar which splits the main category into many subcategories. Each of these subcategories essentially filter the main landing page into more defined categories customers find useful (price/colour) BUT once clicked enter into a separate landing page. We have worked hard to avoid any duplicate content issues between these sub-landing pages and the main landing page. This was done as we wanted each of the subpages to organically rank (thus we went with this method rather than filters). Hope we didn't do the wrong thing there? The question is should these sub-landing pages route straight from home to have the best chance to get individually ranked or routed through the main category bearing in mind we have 5 main categories each with many subcategories. i.e. domain.co.uk/subcategory or domain.co.uk/category/subcategory Thanks in advance for any advice given.
On-Page Optimization | | jannkuzel0 -
Optimizing Wordpress Categories
I’m trying to optimize the category links in the wordpress blog http://blog.reputationforward.com. I’m in the process of installing the Yeost SEO plugin and am going to revise the Category Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and slugs. I’m also in the process of using Tags so that I can get the posts that appear in a category to be specific to that category (currently the publisher is listing posts in multiple categories: See “Business Management Category”). But other than that, is there anything else I can do to optimize each category?
On-Page Optimization | | EricVallee341