Hierarchy and consistency in ecommerce URLs

[DocdataCommerce]

One of the first things I remember reading about SEO and URLs, a long time ago, is that keywords are important, and hierarchy is important, for search engines and for users. Hierarchy in URLs would give the search engines an idea of the structure of the site, and users would be able to edit the URLs to continue navigating.

I'm wondering about URLs, hierarchy and usability lately, since I've seen that ASOS uses a new URL structure on their site. At first glance, I thought it was brilliant, so I would like to get all of your opinions as well.

For those of you that haven't seen the URLs: for categories, ASOS uses a structure as you would expect it, but for products they don't insert the category in the URL. Instead they insert the brand name as the first part of the URL, followed by the product title. Some examples:

Category:
www.asos.com/women/dresses/...

Product:
www.asos.com/french-connection/french-connection-tie-waist-pocket-stripe-dress/...

I can see the importance of brand name for a site like ASOS, and like how they stressed this by inserting not the category but the brand for products. I don't know how much ASOS still relies on organic non-ASOS related keyword traffic, but still.

Now, for hierarchy, I guess a good internal linking structure will tell the search engines about the hierarchy of a site as well, right? So perhaps hierarchy in the URL isn't that important? Perhaps something like this would be just as good as anything, given a good internal link structure?

www.onlinestore.com/category/
www.onlinestore.com/subcategory/
www.onlinestore.com/brand/product-title/

Now, I understand that if you use this structure, you wouldn't be able to have men/shirts and women/shirts, but let's say that you don't have subcategories that use the same names. In this case, how important is hierarchy?

And, what do you think about this URL structure for an ecommerce site for which brands are important?

[blu42media]

Interesting insights for sure - here are some additional thoughts:

• Taking a quick look at the source, perhaps the engines may see this as a logical grouping, though it would certainly be more beneficial for more linkage back to the brand page from the product page.
• You mentioned not having men/shirts or women/shirts with this structure.  What about having men-shirts/ or women-shirts/ ?

When there are multiple layers of links, as in an ecommerce site, it's a good practice to strongly support each linking level, with pages pointing back to their parents.

[DocdataCommerce]

Indeed John, using men-shirts would certainly be an option as a solution to the double names. If I understand you correctly, this would result in something like this:

www.onlinestore.com/men/
www.onlinestore.com/men-shirts/
www.onlinestore.com/men-denim-shirts/
www.onlinestore.com/levis/levis-stone-wash-denim-shirt/

So I wonder if a flat URL structure, supported by proper internal linking of course, could be a viable option, or could perhaps even the prefered option?

Michel