Hlp with site setup

[IvanaDaulay]

Hi there and thanks for the great information, certainly lots to take in.

Can anyone suggest the best way to setup product / category  url structure for a store?

At the moment we have something like domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html

As the product url, we edited url structure using a plugin, we don't use default WooCommerce url settings.

domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html.     this can sometimes be long

But when you click on the product the url changes to the following.

domainname.com/product name.html.      This can shorted the url by 40% and still have keyword in url

Is there any benefit in doing his? Re canonical urls, I only have about 15 products that are selected in many categories.the other 200 are under once category only.

Product pages don't have many backlinks at the moment.

Thanking you so much.

[IvanaDaulay]

HI seoelevated thaks again for taking the time to explain.

That helps a lot and will adjust the site accordingly, it makes sense.

[seoelevated]

To my understanding, a redirect and a canonical are treated very similarly from an SEO standpoint. With either of these, only the end URL (either the one to which you are redirecting, or the one linked in the canonical reference) is the one which, if all directives are honored, gets indexed. So, unless I'm missing something, there is no benefit at all of having the category paths in the URLs if you are either redirecting from those to the flat one, or if you are pointing a canonical to the flat one. The benefit would be there if those keywords were in the final URL (redirected or canonical). But if the final URL is flat, then I don't think you get any benefits from the non-canonical URLs having keywords in their paths. So, if the flat URL is the final one, from either method, I would ensure that the "product name" is fully descriptive with the desired keywords.

[IvanaDaulay]

Hi seoelevated, thanks for taking the time to explain.

The reason for asking was that I noticed many sites that rank well within our industry display the full path in their urls, for example, domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html and this allows them to do as you suggested, have keywords in the category, then sub cat and then finally the product title.

Many when clicking on a product remove the categoy urls completely, something like this, domainname.com/product name.html and I didn't understand why but it makes sense now. I just thought that there might have been an SEO benefit to doing this.

Looking at our site we do have the following setup link href="https://www.domainname.com/category/subcat/product.html/" rel="canonical" so I assume that this tells google the right path to follow. I think that the disadvantage here is that urls can become quite long so they need to be optimised, much shorter than they are now.

As of accessing urls from many locations, some articles that you read say that the url should only be accessible from one path which was my worry. Although the cannical url tag is there I dont know if its it hurts our website if you can still access from all of the following, is this okay or should I not worry about it.

domainname.com/parentcategory/subcategory/product name.html
domainname.com/subcategory/product name.html
domainname.com/product name.html
domainname.com/parentcategory/product name.html

[seoelevated]

The benefit of the directory paths approach is the additional keywords, if your product name (or ID) is not in itself descriptive enough. For example, if you have a sofa style named "Diana", you wouldn't want your URL to be domainname.com/diana.html. Something like domainname.com/furniture/sofas/diana.html would be better.

But, you can accomplish that with more descriptive product IDs. So, in the example above, if you could make your product name "furniture-sofas-diana", then your URL would be domainname.com/furniture-sofas-diana.html, which accomplishes the same keyword targeting.

And then that solves the issue of when products are in multiple categories, since it's a flat URL regardless of how the visitor arrived to the page.

But if your products are really almost entirely in a single category each (keeping in mind temporary categories like "sale", "new", etc.), and they will be that way forever, then there is an argument to be made for the paths. Because it does help the search engine to parse up your site, and to provide nice breadcrumbs on your listings.

This is really a perennial debate. And there's no one answer. For most of us, we do have to live with products being in multiple categories, as the norm (especially when considering categories like sale, new, best sellers, etc.). Canonical reference links help this issue, but aren't necessarily ideal.

But, what really struck me in your question was that you said the URL changes when you click on the product. Ideally, you don't want all your internal links to be redirects. That's something I would try to avoid.