Is it worth re-structuring URLs if breadcrumbs are enabled?

[leighcounsell]

Hi Moz Community,

I am wondering if anyone can shed some light on this current predicament I am facing...

For my website, which is the site for a magazine I work for, the current URL structure is www.website.com/article-title

At first glance, I thought it must be that we would have to re-structure the URLs to include the category structure, for example... www.website.com/category/sub-category/article-title

However, upon deeper investigation, I've seen that we do actually have breadcrumbs enabled therefore google is indexing and following the structure that we would re-activate for the URL structure i.e. www.website.com/category/sub-category/article-title

With this in mind, is it actually worth re-structuring the URLs to include these categories as it will take a long time to organise and implement?!

Obviously, thinking in terms of UX, it is a must-do, but I'm just trying to weigh up the pro's and cons with this..

Appreciate your help,

Leigh

[dohertyjf]

Hey Leigh! Can you clarify if the search engines are crawling the /category/article-title/ URLs or if your breadcrumbs just hint that it is the structure? Feel free to PM me the site if you want.

Whether it's worth restructuring or not to add /category/ to the URLs depends on a lot of things. It's definitely helped on ecomm sites and I've recently done this with a marketplace I've worked with, which has really helped with rankings and longterm will really help with traffic.

But you need to weigh it and the different considerations - all the redirects that need to take place, updating sitemaps, internal links, etc - against other things you could do to improve your rankings like building links and developing new content, as well as generally speeding up your site if needed. URL changes are never something to take lightly!