URL / sitemap structure for support pages

[InterCall]

I am creating a site that has four categories housed in folders off of the TLD.

Example:

example.com/category-1
example.com/category-2
example.com/category-3
example.com/category-4

Those category folders contain sub-folders that house the products inside each category.

Example:

example.com/category-1/product-1
example.com/category-2/product-1
etc.

Each of the products have a corresponding support page with technical information, FAQs, etc. I have three options as to how to structure the support pages' URLs.

Option 1 - Add new sub-folder with "support" added to string:

example.com/category-1/product-1-support

Option 2 - Add a second sub-folder off of the product sub-folder for support:

example.com/category-1/product-1/support

Option 3 - Create a "support" folder with product sub-folders:

example.com/support/product-1

Which of these three options would you choose? I don't like having one large /support folder that houses all products. It seems like this would create a strange crawling and UX situation. The sitemap would have a huge /support folder with all of my products in it and the keywords in my category folders would be replaced with the word "support."

Because I would rather have the main product pages ranking over any of the support pages (outside of searches containing the word "support"), I am leaning toward Option 2: example.com/category-1/product-1/support. I think this structure indicates to crawlers that the more important page is the product page, while the support page is secondary to that. It also makes it clear to users that this is the support page for that particular product.

Does anyone have any experience or perspective on this? I'm open to suggestions and if I'm overthinking it, tell me that too.

Thanks, team.

[CleverPhD]

Agree with Dirk.  You can use links to show the structure more effectively than the URLs per se.

[DirkC]

Hi,

To be very honest - I don't think crawlers are looking at the way you structure your url's. In my opinion these 3 options are equally valid and it depends on your personal preference how you want to organise it. Also think about your reporting needs - it's very easy in Analytics to put filters based on folders (or to use the drill-down reporting)

What is more important is how you make this information accessible for the users - which is completely unrelated to the url.
Like Bryan mentioned - it could be useful to have a support section on your site - regrouping all the support documents for all the products on your site. Again - this could be done regardless of your choice of url's.

To determine the importance of a page crawlers are mainly looking at two things:

• how many links does this page get (both internal and external)
• how many clicks do I need to get from the homepage to this particular page

The relevance is also determined by factors like appearance of keyword in url, H1,...etc all the basic stuff - but these would again be identical for the 3 scenario's you propose.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[Lumina]

That depends on the UX and UI. If it makes sense that someone looking at one support document may be interested in others, or other support-related content in general, I would absolutely go with Option 3. However, if the product support pages are absolutely meant to only be related to the specific product, then Option 1 or 2 (which sound like they're the same thing) would be fruitful.

I, myself, would go with Option 3 without question. But it really depends on your navigation and such.