Should we remove category paths for better SEO?

[Jseddon92]

We're looking to build some serious content and capitalise on long-tail keyword traffic for our sub-category pages, example for targeted keyword "designer dining tables".

Example of current link: www.website.com/designer-furniture/designer-dining-tables.html

Would removing the category paths help?

Example result - www.website.com/designer-dining-tables

More user friendly URLs and better for SEO would you suggest?

The only problem is, if we removed the paths would this have a hit on our traffic?

Any advice would be much appreciated. We are using Magento platform.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Josh

Do not remove categories. This helps give your website a hierarchy and helps crawlers understand how your website is laid out. It is also great for breadcrumbs and helping users understand exactly where they are in the site. If your website creates dynamic URLs, look into canonical tags.

Here are some great resources:
URLs Best Practices (Moz)
Information Architecture for SEO (Moz)
Internal Links (Moz)

To me, having categories in the URL are very important for many reasons. Make sure you discuss with your team and think about users/crawlers. It helps a lot to give your website a structure and not make it seems super flat.

It also helps with Sitelinks and it's search box!

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[mcelano_compassknowledge.com]

This answer would depend on a few things. Single or multiple designer furniture offerings? How much traffic do you currently generate to those pages? What's the overall website strategy (ecommerce? blog?). In my opinion, removing the category page (/designer-future/) would really only make sense if "designer dining tables" was the ONLY product your website offered. If that was the case, then I'd imagine you'd have similar content on both your category & sub-category pages thus resulting in potential duplicate content issues & an overall confusing UX.

Conversely, if you have more than 1 sub-category (ie designer chairs, couches, entertainment centers, etc) then I would advise keeping your current url structure. Targeting long-tail keywords at a sub-category level could help in building the authority of the category page (assuming proper internal linking is in place). What you may find is that the more you target "designer dining tables", the more Google thinks your site must be about designer furniture and thus resulting in potential ranking improvements for your category page, designer furniture. Just a personal preference, I would drop "designer" from the sub-category page as it's inferred by the parent page. I guess it just depends if you want a more keyword heavy url, or a cleaner, shorter url. Either one is fine. For tips on URL Best Practices, check out this article by Rand:

http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls

Hope this was helpful!

[Jseddon92]

Hi Matt,

This answers my question perfectly. Everything we sell is 'designer goods' including tables, wardrobes, sideboards etc you name it.

My only concern was to have the word 'designer' too many times in the URL as it would look a little spammy, but as you described we can just keep the word 'designer' for the parent page and leave it out for the sub-categories.

We used SEM Rush and noticed a competitor doing really well in the SERPs and they have all their category path URLs removed so I was just curious if this had an impact on SEO, as the URLs looks short and user friendly.

Josh