URL Folders and Naming Convention Changes?

[Ties.com]

1. We’re looking for some clarification in regards to our URL structure. Currently, at our product level we have http://www.ties.com/v/a/elite-solid-black-black-tie however the parent URL is http://www.ties.com/black-ties.

a. So here are the question. How much is this hurting because semantically the naming convention of this URL and weird and doesn’t follow logical patterns. In other words. Should the product page for this be http://ties.com/black-ties/elite-solid-black-tie. How bad is this hurting us?

b. If we were to change the ULR structure, should we do it in phases or all at once? We don’t want to get penalized. We have well over 3,000 product pages.

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hi Omar,

The URL structure really won't hurt you. In fact, your product-level URLs are better than most since they use actual keywords in them. Any more, Google and Bing do a good job of understanding all kinds of URLs. If you had a brand new site, I'd say go with the URL you suggested in (a) but for an existing site with thousands of pages, you won't see any noticeable impact by making this change.

With your URLs, you want to make sure your internal linking structure makes it clear what pages are first, second, third, etc. in the hierarchy (how and where you place links). You also want to make sure Google and Bing are indexing all of those pages (meaning, Google and Bing can find all the URLs). So long as those two things are happening, you really do not have a problem.

I hope that helps. Thanks,

Matthew