Thanks Everett,

Strange, the product on the website appears in two places, on the homepage 'Featured' product, and in the Chanel > 2.55 bags category. When I check both I only see the product name after the .com/.

Thanks for the heads up about restructuring to match the rel canonical, makes perfect sense. I'll be moving over to Wordpress, Woocomerce at some point in the future. I'll look into making the linkable URL neat and tidy as suggested.

Much appreciated...

Kevin

Hi Everett,

Thank you for your considered response.

Choice wise, I feel fairly constrained by my shopping cart (Opencart, and lack of technical ability !

So am I correct in thinking that Google reads the rel canonical, not what appears in the URL? I've checked the generated rel canonical & by default it takes just the product name, probably as products, as you say, can be in more than 1 category. So I get: www.vintageheirloom.com/red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag-1362483150

As you say this omits the term chanel & vintage.

With no understanding of how to implement your suggestion of putting all products into a 'products' category I think it might be safer for me to leave as is... for now. I'll certainly bear this in mind when I next rebuild the website, all good food for thought.

Thanks!

Thanks Takeshi,

Good to know. Any harm in adding an additional 'vintage' here to match H2 product name?

www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag...

Or does that look spammy?

Hi Mozzers,

I've been mulling over whether my URLs could benefit a little SEO tweaking. I'd be grateful for your opinion.

For instance, we've a product, a vintage (second hand), red Chanel bag. At the moment the URL is:

www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/2.55-bags/red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag-1362483150

Broken down...

vintage-chanel-bags = this is the main product category, i.e. vintage chanel bags

2.55-bags = is a sub category of the main category above. They are vintage Chanel 2.55 bags, but I've not included 'vintage' again. 2.55 bags are a type of Chanel bag.

red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag = this is the product, the bag

**1362483150 **= this is a unique id, to prevent the possibility of duplicate URLs

As you no doubt can see we target, in particular, the phrase **vintage. **The actual bag / product title is: Vintage Chanel Red 2.55 classic double flap bag 10” / 25cm

With this in mind, would I be better off trying to match the product name with the end of the URL as closely as possible?

So a close match below would involve not repeating 'chanel' again:

www.vintageheirloom.com/chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag

or an exact match below would involve repeating 'chanel':

www.vintageheirloom.com/chanel-bags/2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag

This may open up more flexibility to experiment with product terms like second hand, preowned etc.

Maybe this is a bad idea as I'm removing the phrase 'vintage' from the main category. But this logical extension of this looks like keyword stuffing !!

www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-chanel-bags/vintage-2.55-bags/vintage-chanel-red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag

Maybe this is over analyzing, but I doubt it?

Thanks for looking.

Kevin

Hi Everett,

Thank you for your considered response.

Choice wise, I feel fairly constrained by my shopping cart (Opencart, and lack of technical ability !

So am I correct in thinking that Google reads the rel canonical, not what appears in the URL? I've checked the generated rel canonical & by default it takes just the product name, probably as products, as you say, can be in more than 1 category. So I get: www.vintageheirloom.com/red-2.55-classic-double-flap-bag-1362483150

As you say this omits the term chanel & vintage.

With no understanding of how to implement your suggestion of putting all products into a 'products' category I think it might be safer for me to leave as is... for now. I'll certainly bear this in mind when I next rebuild the website, all good food for thought.

Thanks!