Ecommerce Product Subcategory URL

[jannkuzel]

Our website has 5 main categories displayed in tabs in the header.

The main landing page of each of the 5 categories is a paginated page (3pages- set up with canonical tags to avoid duplicate content) with a side bar which splits the main category into many subcategories.

Each of these subcategories essentially filter the main landing page into more defined categories customers find useful (price/colour) BUT once clicked enter into a separate landing page. We have worked hard to avoid any duplicate content issues between these sub-landing pages and the main landing page. This was done as we wanted each of the subpages to organically rank (thus we went with this method rather than filters).

Hope we didn't do the wrong thing there?

The question is should these sub-landing pages route straight from home to have the best chance to get individually ranked or routed through the main category bearing in mind we have 5 main categories each with many subcategories.

i.e.

domain.co.uk/subcategory  or

domain.co.uk/category/subcategory

Thanks in advance for any advice given.

[AlanMosley]

not sure what you mean by route from home page, but anyhow.
the number of /folders/ in a url does not make any difference to ranking(not with google anyhow, it may with bing), but the number of clicks from the home page does.

any page you want to rank, you should have linking from the home page if posible,.

[jannkuzel]

Thank you Alan.

I shall go with your advice.

All the best.