Shortening URL's

[ATP]

Hello again Mozzers,

I am debating what could be a fairly drastic change to the company website and I would appreciate your thoughts.

The URL structure is currently as follows

Product Pages
www.url.co.uk/product.html

Category Pages
www.url.co.uk/products/category/subcategory.html

I am debating removing the /products/ section as i feel it doesn't really add much and lengthens the url with a pointless word. This does mean however redirecting about 50-60 pages on the website, is this worth it? Would it do more damage than good? Am i just being a bit OCD and it wont really have an impact?

As always, thanks for the input

[BradsDeals]

Unless you're already not ranking well, changing URLs is a big risk, honestly. I don't think you're likely to see much gain, if any, by dropping one fairly sensible word/subfolder from your URL structure, the risk and work involved to set it up with 301s and the like far outweighs the benefit, which is questionable at best to start. I wouldn't do it unless I was burning it down and starting over.

[ATP]

Sorry the wording made this seems unclear

The /products/ section isn't a product. It is a parent category called Products,

Our set-up is  domain.com/cateogry/sub-cat/sub-cat/

but the main category is called "products".

It is this main parent category im thinking of removing and moving all other category 1 step up the hierarchy.

[MoosaHemani]

I am a little confused, normal ecommerce websites usually work as domain.com/category/subcategory/products and as your URL structure contains product/category I believe this is not a common scenario.

Here are my general recommendations.

1. If you are changing the URL structure and removing products from the URL, see how many external links are pointing to the internal pages as even if you set proper 301, some of the link juice will be lost and that will impact your rankings.
2. Around 50 redirections are not that much so you can do it all at once but before doing that you should have to have a plan B in-case of anything goes wrong.
3. The rankings and traffic are going to go down for a bit so you have to have a plan to get some new links so that the traffic and ranking can be restored.

Hope this helps!