Site structure question

[OxzenMedia]

I'm doing a site that will have many many pages.
Now I have heard that you get more seo value if its a lower tear so for example:

site.com/product

rather than

site.com/brand/subbrand/product

Is this correct?

Should I structure my site like this?

site.com/product
site.com/brand points to site.com/product

(so all products are on the sub root.)

Does that make sense?

[Trupanion]

I would focus more on your Site Architecture.  Focus on clicks from the home page.

There is a great article about it here (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo), along with a link to Rand's video on Site Architecture.

[RyanKent]

The actual physical directories you use are really not a factor. You can have a webserver path that looks like site.com/brand/subbrand/productid/product but reach it from a URL of site.com/product if you use routes or other means of creating a virtual path.

That aside, what's important is not how deep a page is in your directory structure, but how many clicks would it take a user or crawler to get to the page. If a user has to click from Nike.com to "Nike shoes" then "Nike running shoes" then "Nike 3000x running shoe",  that would be a concern, especially if there are more levels to your structure.

On the other hand, if you have a link on your home page that says "Nike Running Shoes", or a link from your home page directly to your latest products, that would get those pages more value from a SEO perspective.

[Getz.pro]

No more than 3 levels deep.

Yes, as you have written.

site.com/products-category/product-001.html The brand name could be a hyper to the brand page

site.com/brand/ where this list all the brands. Click on a brand, pulls the product page with a filter.

Then I have some high level brands that list their products on the brand page as an all inclusive.

Now I did have to remove my 'brand' links from my product pages as I was getting too many links on the page, so look out for that.

You are on the correct path.

[fergseo]

Can you go into more detail about this problem with your brand links on your product pages? How did you determine the right number of links that should be on a page? Couldn't you use "no-follow" tags in the URLs and solve the same issue?

[Getz.pro]

You could use no-follow, but for this purpose, it seemed best to just not hyper the text. I would have a product page of perhaps 30+ products PLUS links on each of those to the products full description page PLUS links to the brand page PLUS my normal page links. This starts to add up quickly and Roger yelled at me

[OxzenMedia]

Thanks for the responses!

based on some research I think first level is best.

Yahoo stores sets it up this way.

Example: site.com/brands   (then the actual product is in the root)

Yahoo store structures there sites like this.

[KeriMorgret]

One thing to consider with site structure is your analytics. Using a directory structure can give you some valuable information in your analytics -- you can look at a particular category of product in aggregate and see how it is doing, if it is set up properly.

This post from LunaMetrics has some more ideas for setting up a GA-friendly site at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.