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+1 for Survey Monkey! It's easy to implement and provides good reporting as well.

Thanks for the fast response guys!

The "By Brand" path is basically for SEO purposes only. 90% of our visitors use one of two forms to find their tire size.

The first form is a vehicle search which breaks down to the specific tire size and the minimum speed rating requirements. This form accounts for 80% of our form completions.

The second form is by the specific tire size.

When a visitor completes one of these forms, they are only given results that link to the specific item pages that match their vehicle.

We actually do not want people using the "by brand / category" method to find their products as this will almost always lead them down an empty path. Tires must match an exact size for that vehicle.

One the other hand, we do want to show up in search results for these products. Our current results bring us quite a bit of traffic. This method is just to get them into the website. We will have a "Do these tires match my vehicle" form on the this page. If they do not, we will take them to a page explaining why not and provide them with alternate, matching results. By Brand is great for browsing but at the end of the day the tire must be a fit for the vehicle.

Ultimately the end focus of the website will be for them to search by vehicle.

An example of an item level URL (based on Roberts reply) would be:

brand     category       model               item (tire size)
www.company.com/Michelin/Performance/Primacy-MXV4/2055516

This same page would be duplicated 40+ times for each tire size available, with links to these item pages originating from the model page:
www.company.com/Michelin/Performance/Primacy-MXV4/

Would the 40+ individual item pages leading from the model page produce duplicate content issues? These pages will contain the exact same content including our features and benefits and user reviews.

The path of "by brand" from the home page would look as follows:
Home -> Michelin -> Primacy MXV4 - > 205/55R16
or
Home -> Michelin -> Performance -> Primacy MXV4 - > 205/55R16
Whichever one would be deemed better.

I just want to make sure I get it right the first time.

Thanks for the responses!

Hello all!

I'm new to SeoMoz and would like to introduce myself and say thanks for all of the great content. This is definitely the premium website I have been looking for.

My question is regarding a new URL structure that will be implemented with our website redesign. We are looking to make our URL's more user and SEO friendly. We will be using 301 redirects to reroute our existing structure when the site goes live.

Background
I work in a company that retails automotive tires. I would consider class (performance, off-road, highway, etc.) to be the most important category, but based on our analytics we receive much more traffic from brand terms.  This is most likely because our customers are not educated on specific tire classes and generally do head term searches or search by brand / product name. Ultimately the will have to buy from a certain class based on driving habits.

Link and URL Structure
(Parameters)

• The model page includes links to individual tire size specific pages.
• We are using the model page as our primary SEO page because the only difference from the 5 - 60 tire size specific pages per model will be the tire size itself. This means that all of the remaining content will be duplicated multiple times over.
• All links to the tire size specific page from the model page will have a rel="nofollow" attribute attached to it.
• All tire size specific pages will have a rel="canonical" tag pointing back to the model page

Out of the following structures, which would you consider to be the best format:

1. http://www.company.com/category/brand/model
or
2. http://www.company.com/brand/category/model
or
3. http://www.company.com/tires/category/model

We will append the specific tire-size to the URL on the item specific pages.

Any other options or strategies will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help!

+1 for Survey Monkey! It's easy to implement and provides good reporting as well.