Product Category Subcategory hierarchy

[MangoMM]

Hi all,

I am developing an ecommerce store and would like some advice on the Category / Product URL structure for SEO purposes.

• Products have many options
• Products belong to a sub-category.
• Sub categories belong to a category

There will be a maximum of 500 products in the database.

1. http://shop.com/{category}/{product_slug}?{product_option} Flattened with query string option

• http://shop.com/apple/iphone-5s?model=32gb&colour=white

2. http://shop.com/{category}/{subcategory}/{product_slug}?{product_option} // Hierarchical with query string option

3. http://shop.com/{category}/{product_slug}/{product_option}

4. http://shop.com/{category}/{subcategory}/{product_slug}/{product_option}

5. http://shop.com/{category}/{product-slug}

• http://shop.com/apple/iphone-5s-32gb-black

Option 5 seems best to me, however I am also worried about duplicate content between pages.

• http://shop.com/apple/iphone-5s-32gb-black
• http://shop.com/apple/iphone-5s-64gb-black
• http://shop.com/apple/iphone-5s-64gb-white

The above 3 examples will all have very similar content. And if I use canonical url tag, which product page would I refer these pages to?

At least with Option 1 I can use the canonical tag to tell search engines that pages with get parameters can point to the non get parameter version.

In addition to Option 5, should I create a http://shop.com/{category}/{subcategory} page? That way Option 5 item canonical tags can point to that page. e.g. http://shop.com/apple/iphone-5s which would contain product summary detail with product options listed on the page?

Am I missing something here or can anybody provide a better solution?

[Everett]

I typically keep category names out of the product URL. It creates problems, especially when the product lives in multiple categories. You can use a rel canonical tag, but I'd rather just not have to deal with it. Here is how I do it:

www.domain.com/products/product-name/

www.domain.com/category/category-name/ and
www.domain.com/category/category-name/sub-category-name/

This convention has several advantages, including easy segmentation of the site to determine, for instance, how many product pages are indexed in the SERPs.

One could argue that having the category name in the product URL is good for SEO because of the keywords, but I would argue that putting the product farther down in the site structure, and the non-canonical URL issues related to certain taxonomies (e.g. multiple categories for a product) negates what little benefit keywords in the URL have these days.

Of course not all eCommerce platforms really allow the structure above. Magento, for example, will allow you to put products in the root, but not in the /product/ folder. The product will also be viewable on the category-version of the URLs, but they will have a rel canonical tag pointing to the root directory version.

Good luck.