Flat architecture or deep folders?

[BCutrer]

We have an e-commerce client that is launching a new site. In setting up for it they decided that they want to change their navigation on the site and url structure. So everything being even, the new site will have appropriate 301 and it's built on Magento so the product pages are all structured as website.com/product-A but the category pages will now be deeper than before. So before it was website.com/product-category/product-sub-category will now be website.com/more generic category/product-category/new-subcategory/product-category. Hope that makes sense. I'm not as worried about the 301's or specific products but I'm worried the category pages dropping a folder level will hurt page authority. Any thoughts, am I being overly nervous?

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi Bill,

You are rightly worried about the change in category structure, the structure earlier looks better than new structure of category page URL (before it was website.com/product-category/product-sub-category will now be website.com/more generic category/product-category/new-subcategory/product-category ).

The idea of right page URL structure should be to keep the length of URL in control and also give show the right directory structure to the search engines. It seems with the new structure you can get lengthy URLs and also repeat lot of keywords within the URL.

Having said that, you should read these two articles for further help
https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
https://moz.com/learn/seo/url

I hope this helps, feel free to respond and ask further.

Regards,

Vijay