Is Top Level Brand Page Necessary?

[Swell.com]

We currently a variety of brand landing pages on our e-commerce site. What’s slightly unusual here is these brand landing pages all belong to a Men’s or Women’s category. Typically, e-commerce sites have one level up in the hierarchy where you can go to a general index brand landing page from which you can then select Men’s or Women’s products for that brand. For example, here’s what we have currently:

www.site.com/mens-brandx

www.site.com/womens-brandx

We do NOT have a layer-above page like this:  www.site.com/brandx  that would allow you to see the full consolidated selection of Brand X items with nav links for Men’s and Women’s to drill down further.

We think this divided approach might be hurting our rankings for brand-oriented keywords, many for which we have inventory in both the men’s and women’s markets. If a user were to search for something that isn’t gender-specific like “brand X apparel”, the search engines would need to decide which page, men’s vs women’s, is more relevant.  So we are wondering if our SEO concerns are valid before investing in creating all the new pages and maintaining all three.

[DotCar]

Without knowing more about your site it's really hard to say.  There are a number of "right" ways to do it depending on your site architecture and site-search architecture.

I personally like the idea of having a single "Brand" page and leaving the sorting to a search experience that is "walled off" from being indexed and crawled which is something Rand covered in a WBF about two years ago.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation