Site Structure question

[DavidKonigsberg]

when deciding the Site structure for a e-commerce site Is it better to keep everything mysite.com/widget.html or use categories like mysite.com/Gifts/widget.html

[Thos003]

That is more often than not an organizational preference. However, there is a benefit to having your keywords in the URL. So in your example, if "gifts" is a keyword then there is a benefit.  But if you wrote the first as mysite,com/gifts-widget.html then the point would go back to preference.If you want your site to be heavily associated with a category, like /gifts/ then I would opt for the category.And to add to that, the Google Bot does try to think on it's own now, so it may test your /category/ page for it's own content, which could put a slight advantage on the category. But that is pure skepticism.

So your choice, but I would lean toward creating keyword categories.

[CPU]

If the categories themselves are terms that you want to compete in the SERP's for then having them is worth considering if not I would lean towards the /productname approach rather than /category/productname

[KeriMorgret]

Check out this post by Lunametrics on Designing a Google Analytics Friendly Site. You'll see that there is an advantage to having a little more structure and organization to your URLs when you want to go back and look at your analytics.