Potential new URL structure for my ecommerce site

[joe-ainswoth]

At the moment my site suffers from a flat product category structure where over 600 items fall into one category alone. This category is then filtered using a faceted search which appends query strings to the category URL and changes the products displayed on the page.

At the moment our product category URL is as follows, www.domain.com/category/greeting-cards and this holds all cards including occasions such as anniversary, birthdays etc and also themes such as animal cards, contemporary cards etc

I have proposed changes to my developer to change this structure to include subcategories. I can now go two subcategories deep. For example, "greeting cards > occasions > birthday cards" or "greeting cards > themes > animals". This is reflected in the new URL structure, which has been proposed, www.domain.com/greeting-cards/occasions/birthday-cards. In this URL do I need "occasions" in the URL as I don't think it adds much value to the user? Would I be better of having www.domain.com/greeting-cards/birthday-cards. If a user searches for "birthday cards" then I think this would be more relevant?

[Everett]

Q: The example I gave earlier "www.domain.com/greeting-cards/occasions/birthday-cards/" would this be considered keyword stuffing if I am targetting the keyword "birthday cards"?

A: Absolutely not. If you saw a real keyword stuffed URL you'd probably laugh out loud at the fact that people are still writing URLs like www.bluewidgets.com/widgets/blue-widgets/best-blue-widgets/top_blue_widget.html . Your example is just a clear URL representation of the structure of your site.

Q: Keeping in mind this taxonomy would it be better for my URLs to follow this pattern instead? www.domain.com/greeting-cards, www.domain.com/occasions, www.domain.com/birthday-cards?

A: That depends. Are birthday cards a form of greeting cards? Are occasions just a way to categorize greeting cards by occasion? If so, they should probably go under the /greeting-cards/ directory.

Q?: All of our product pages have URLs formatted as follows /product/product-name.

A: Good. I'd keep them like that. You don't need category folders in the product URL.

[joe-ainswoth]

Thanks for your response Everett.

I don't have too much control I have to ask the developers to make the changes but we are going through a restructure at the moment and want to try and get things right.

The example I gave earlier "www.domain.com/greeting-cards/occasions/birthday-cards/" would this be considered keyword stuffing if I am targetting the keyword "birthday cards"?

Keeping in mind this taxonomy would it be better for my URLs to follow this pattern instead? www.domain.com/greeting-cards, www.domain.com/occasions, www.domain.com/birthday-cards?

All of our product pages have URLs formatted as follows /product/product-name.

[Everett]

If you have control over how all of this works I recommend keeping things consistent. So if the taxonomy is "greeting cards > occasions > birthday cards" and the breadcrumb is "greeting cards > occasions > birthday cards" then the URL path should be "/greeting-cards/occasions/birthday-cards/".

This one is debatable, but my personal preference is also to have /product/ in that url path to differentiate product pages from category URLs, blog posts and other types of pages.