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
-
Does the url in for your homepage impact SEO
Is there any harm to SEO having a homepage url that is not clean like www.domain.com. For example citi uses https://online.citi.com/US/login.do Does that matter in any way? Would a company like citi benefit from changing to www.citi.com as their homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kcb81781 -
How to create AMP Pages for product website?
How to create AMP Pages for product website? I mean we can create it easily when we have wordpress through plugin, what about when we have millions of pages, It would be too tedious to create amp version of every page. So, is there any alternative way to create amp version?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sachin.kaushik0 -
Product instant answers?
Hi Guys, I noticed today that Google was serving a VERY different organic result for a product level search. The query was "giro aspect". Included is a screenshot of the SERP. Anyone know about these? Is there anything we need to do to get this (i.e certain schema.org markup)? Any insights appreciated,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evoNick
Will fPzGb06.jpg0 -
URL Optimisation Dilemma
First of all, I fully appreciate that I may be over analysing this, so feel free to highlight if you think I’m going overboard on this one. I’m currently trying to optimise the URLs for a group of new pages that we have recently launched. I would usually err on the side of leaving the urls as they are so that any incoming links are not diluted through the 301 re-direct. In this case, however, there are very few links to these pages, so I don’t think that changing URLs will harm them. My main question is between short URLs vs. long URLs (I have already read Dr. Pete’s post on this). Note: the URLs I have listed below are not the actual URLs, but very similar examples that I have created. The URLs currently exist in a similar format to the examples below: http://www.company.com/products/dlm/hire-ca My first response was that we could put a few descriptive keywords in the url, with something like the following: http://www.company/products/debt-lifecycle-management/hire-collection-agents - I’m worried though that the URL will get too long for any pages sitting under this. As a compromise, I am considering the following: http://www.company/products/dlm/hire-collection-agents My feeling is that the second approach will give the best balance between having the keywords for the products and trying to ensure good user experience. My only concern is whether the /dlm/ category page would suffer slightly, but this would have ‘debt-lifecycle-management’ in the title tag. Does this sound like a good approach to people? Or do you think I’m being a little obsessive about this? Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Complex URL Migration
Hi There, I have three separate questions which are all related. Some brief back ground. My client has an adventure tourism company that takes predominantly North American customers on adventure tours to three separate destinations: New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. They previously had these sites on their own URL's. These URL's had the destination in the URL (eg: sitenewzealand.com). 2 of the three URL's had good age and lots of incoming links. This time last year a new web company was bought in and convinced them to pull all three sites onto a single domain and to put the sites under sub folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand). The built a brand new site for them on a Joomla platform. Unfortunately the new sites have not performed and halved the previous call to action rates. Organic traffic was not adversely affected with this change, however it hasn't grown either. I have been overhauling these new sites with a project team and we have managed to keep the new design but make usability/marketing changes that have the conversion rate nearly back to where it originally was and we have managed to keep the new design (and the CMS) in place. We have recently made programmatic changes to the joomla system to push the separate destination sites back onto their original URL's. My first question is around whether technically this was a good idea. Question 1 Does our logic below add up or is it flawed logic? The reasons we decided to migrate the sites back onto their old URL's were: We have assumed that with the majority of searches containing the actual destination (eg: "New Zealand") that all other things being equal it is likely to attract a higher click through rate on the domain www.sitenewzealand.com than for www.site.com/new-zealand. Having the "newzealand" in the actual URL would provide a rankings boost for target keyword phrases containing "new zealand" in them. We also wanted to create the consumer perception that we are specialists in each of the destinations which we service rather than having a single site which positions us as a "multi-destination" global travel company. Two of the old sites had solid incoming links and there has been very little new links acquired for the domain used for the past 12 months. It was also assumed that with the sites on their own domains that the theme for each site would be completely destination specific rather than having the single site with multiple destinations on it diluting this destination theme relevance. It is assumed that this would also help us to rank better for the destination specific search phrases (which account for 95% of all target keyword phrases). The downsides of this approach were that we were splitting out content onto three sites instead of one with a presumed associated drop in authority overall. The other major one was the actual disruption that a relatively complex domain migration could cause. Opinions on the logic we adopted for deciding to split these domains out would be highly appreciated. Question 2 We migrated the folder based destination specific sites back onto their old domains at the start of March. We were careful to thoroughly prepare the htaccess file to ensure we covered off all the new redirects needed and to directly redirect the old redirects to the new pages. The structure of each site and the content remained the same across the destination specific folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand/hiking became sitenewzealand.com/hiking). To achieve this splitting out of sites and the ability to keep the single instance of Joomla we wrote custom code to dynamically rewrite the URL's. This worked as designed. Unfortunately however, Joomla had a component which was dynamically creating the google site maps and as this had not had any code changes it got all confused and started feeding up a heap of URL's which never previously existed. This resulted in each site having 1000 - 2000 404's. It took us three weeks to work this out and to put a fix into place. This has now been done and we are down to zero 404's for each site in GWT and we have proper google site maps submitted (all done 3 days ago). In the meantime our organic rankings and traffic began to decline after around 5 days (after the migration) and after 10 days had dropped down to around 300 daily visitors from around 700 daily visitors. It has remained at that level for the past 2 weeks with no sign of any recovery. Now that we have fixed the 404's and have accurate site maps into google, how long do you think it will take to start to see an upwards trend again and how long it is likely to take to get to similar levels of organic traffic compared to pre-migration levels? (if at all). Question 3 The owner of the company is understandably nervous about the overall situation. He is wishing right now that we had never made the migration. If we decided to roll back to what we previously had are we likely to cause further recovery delays and would it come back to what we previously had in a reasonably quick time frame? A huge thanks to everyone for reading what is quite a technical and lengthy post and a big thank you in advance for any answers. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activenz
Conrad0 -
Ecommerce website consolidation
I have a large ecommerce site and several smaller nitche ecommerce sites. All have the same products, but the smaller sites are loosing traffic. I want to combine all the sites to the larger site so it will be easier to manage, but I don't want to loose any rank on the smaller sites. Example: www.yourpromopeople.com - This is the large site I want to use. www.logocoolies.com www.fourcolormagnets.com - These are a couple of the smaller sites I want to combine with the larger one. Questions: What are the pros and cons in doing this? What would be the best way to do this? Would redirecting the URL's to the larger site's product pages do the trick or is there a better option? Thanks for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHSpecialty0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
Should I shorten my urls?
For my informational site I have a lot of urls that are way too long. When I first created the site, I wrote a script that takes out the common words of a post and fashions a url. So, for example, if the first few words of a question were: Hi there, I have a question about back pain. I'm wondering what drugs would be good for relief and how I can get some help? then my url may be: www.mydomain.com/question?id=123-question-back-pain-wondering-drugs-good-relief-how-get-some-help Once I got learning about seo I realized that these urls were too long but I never did anything about them. Should I be shortening these, or is my time best spent doing something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes2