URL Structure Q - /UniqueURL/ProductA or /SubcategoryURL/ProductA?

[longdenc_gmail.com]

Hi Mozers,

I have a niche ecommerce site http://www.ecustomfinishes.com that sells custom barn wood furniture. I have about 600 products online. 2 weeks ago I started rewriting my urls from /subcategoryurl/ProductA   to    /UNIQUEURL/productA for  my individual products,

For example for my subcategory farm tables (150 products) I had

• /rustic-farm-tables/productA,
• /rustic-farm-tables/ProductB       ...."rustic-farm-table" about 150 times.

2 weeks ago I started changing the 150x "/rustic-farm-table/" to  a more descriptive URL such as

• /white-farm-table/producA
• /rustic-square-dining-table/ProductB
• /Black-harvest-table/ProductC

Here is why I am need advice:

• I have  1181 pages,
• the page with the most entrances with "rustic-farm-tables"  is #31/1181  based on entrances. the 2nd most is #71/1181
• Alternatively, I have 13 table product  pages such a as /12ft-Rustic-Farm-Dining-Table-p/12-foot-table-with-inlay.htm"  that get more entrances than any product that includes "rustic-farm-tables"
• Since changing the urls to be product specific,  my overall traffic has dropped 20%!!!

So here is my question:

• do i continue to have the /UNIQUEURL/product be unique to the product, which is consistant amongst my best preforming pages, yet has dropped my traffic 20% in the last 2 weeks, OR do i keep /SAME-URL/product  which written as  a best practice, and be happy with the traffic I had?
• Could the 20% drop just be a temporary shock? Why would this happen?

This would be a good long tail/head term experiment. Try to get more head terms, or do what you can do focus on long tail. I hope i was able to explain this well, I say follow the best practices of  my best preforming pages, however the 20% drop has me worried.

Thank you in advance for your help

[longdenc_gmail.com]

Hi Simon,

Thank you for your response. I understand the google algo update, and according to matt cutts it seems like this is for urls that are intended to pick up on one search, like www.seohelpinmassachussetts.com, but wouldnt effect website.com/seo-help-in-mass.

To your second comment, my apologies if I did not explain clearly enough, but the driver for my changes is that some of my product pages are getting a lot of entrance traffic and most are getting very very little traffic. I want more entrances for the product pages, so i am replicating what is working. Specifically, all/most of the pages that are getting the high entrances have uniqueurl/product, whereas the ones with /subcategory/product are all getting very little. The shock is my drop in traffic, despite replication of what is working best for my pages. This posted question is to see if anyone has any reactions suggestions or cautions before i make this major adjustment to my site.

best,

Chris

[SCL-SEO]

Hi Chris

Your timing was quite unfortunate as Google rolled out 2 fairly major algorithm changes on 27th Sept - 2 weeks ago today. This may have muddied the waters a little with regards to understanding the reason for your drop in traffic.

It is always quite risky doing a lot of URL re-writing at once - presumably you put 301 redirects from the old to new URL structure? (in case you didn't that is a crucial step in altering the structure of your URLs / changing page names, and may be related to the traffic drop - some useful pointers on that here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/transferring-to-new-url-structure-301-existing-ones)

I am not sure I understand your driver for doing the changes - the URLs were already unique - as long as the productA name is relevant, unique and descriptive then it probably doesn't warrant too much time changing things.

I'd suggest keeping the same-url/product structure and ensure your other on-page SEO is tight and focus on trying to create some new unique interesting content to go with your products to make them stand out. Maybe pictures / stories of some of your furniture in the home environment or something along those lines

Cheers

Simon