Best Product URL For Indexing

[waynekolenchuk]

My proposed URL: mydomain.com/products/category/subcategory/product detail

Puts my products 4 levels deep. Is this too deep to get my products indexed?

[RyanKent]

My proposed URL: mydomain.com/products/category/subcategory/product detail puts my products 4 levels deep. Is this too deep to get my products indexed?

Four levels is usually the maximum depth you would want to step away from your home page. Keep in mind depth is not determined by how the pages are stored on your server nor the number of folder levels in your URL. The question is: how many clicks does it take a user to move from your home page to your product page. THAT is the determining factor.

I recommend a flatter structure whenever possible. mydomain.com/cars/ford/mustang/2012-mustang-gt would be an example URL using the layout you suggested. Some URLs to consider:

mydomain.com/2012-mustang-gt

mydomain.com/ford/2012-mustang-gt

There may be a logical means by which you can drop or combine some levels.

[waynekolenchuk]

Thanks. I have a question. From main top nav, if user (or SE) hovers over Products the category menus drop down and subcategories fly out. User actually clicks on subcategory, with products, and categories being non-clickable. In this scenario, does arriving at the subcategory page count as 3 clicks, or 1?

[RyanKent]

One click.

Keep in mind Google likely treats a link which is immediately visible such as your Products link with more weight then a link which requires a user action to appear. This is my belief and not necessarily an agreed upon SEO standard.

[waynekolenchuk]

Thanks Ryan. In your experience will an SE follow  to the subcategory page if products and categories are non-clickable?

[RyanKent]

They will follow any link on the page. There are a few exceptions such as no follow links and pages with hundreds of links may not have all of them crawled. Links in flash, iframes, etc will likely not be crawled depending on the coding.

[BTeubner]

One cautionary note: If the products are going to live in multiple categories (which a lot of times they do in eCom), I'd go with /product/product-detail. Avoid duplicate pages and having to canonical and get into that whole mess.

You're not going to lose a lot (or probably anything) by not having the category names in the product urls. Just my opinion though...

Magento has some great options for that if you're going in that direction.

[Macaper]

Why adding /products/ in your url? I would definatly strip that out to keep the url clean and relevant, as /products/ is just generic.

The shorter URLs you can have, but still have good "readability" for the user, the better it is, but you still want to have a good structure for inbound linking and not to deep. I would say 3 rather then 4 as the maximum.

I think, to make this fairly complex issue more simple I would say, that if you run content at your category pages, with the possibility to shop products and display of campaign information, then you really need to have the category in your URL. Same goes for subcategories.

[waynekolenchuk]

Thanks for the advice. This was quite a while ago. I wound up going with domain/product-category/product

Works very well - every product I add gets indexed.