Product landing page URL's for e-commerce sites - best practices?

[yousayjump]

Hi all

I have built many e-commerce websites over the years and with each one, I learn something new and apply to the next site and so on. Lets call it continuous review and improvement!

I have always structured my URL's to the product landing pages as such:

mydomain.com/top-category =>

mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category =>

mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category/product-name

Now this has always worked fine for me but I see more an more of the following happening:

mydomain.com/top-category =>

mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category =>

mydomain.com/product-name

Now I have read many believe that the longer the URL, the less SEO impact it may have and other comments saying it is better to have the just the product URL on the final page and leave out the categories for one reason or another.

I could probably spend days looking around the internet for peoples opinions so I thought I would ask on SEOmoz and see what other people tend to use and maybe establish the reasons for your choices?

One of the main reasons I include the categories within my final URL to the product is simply to detect if a product name exists in multiple categories on the site - I need to show the correct product to the user.  I have built sites which actually have the same product name (created by the author) in multiple areas of the site but they are actually different products, not duplicate content. I therefore cannot see a way around not having the categories in the URL to help detect which product we want to show to the user.

Any thoughts?

[BenRWoodard]

Everrett had a great post on the SEOmoz blog the other day.  It covers this exact question.  I always thought like you did but he makes a very strong case for the shorter URL.  If the only difference in the product is what category it is listed in then bread crumbs should do the trick.  If they are distinct pages and products then the user is going to be able to figure it out.

I really think the breadcrumbs is going to be the solution you are looking for.  Most Ecommerce solutions have this in it's core development but some allow you to add it in with little effort.