Link Structure June 2019

[oceanstorm]

Question Which link structure is better in 2019 for best SEO practice

Example A)  https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/soft-plastic-lures/

Or B) https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/fishing/fishing-lures/soft-plastic-lures/

We're on the bigcommerce platform and used to have

https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/categories/soft-plastic-lures/

Last year we went from bigcommerce long URL to short to bypass the link juice being sent to /categories

Now we have an SEO company trying to sell me their services after a bit of a steady decline since september 2018  and told me that we should have link structure as example B and that is likely the reason for the dip..  Due to breadcrumbing, True or False?   
I explained i had bread crumb like shown in  https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/berkley-powerbait-t-tail-minnow/  buy the SEO guy said no it needs to be in the URL structure too.

I was under the impression that Short urls opposed to long was better these days and link juice is passed better if it is short url direct to the point?  Am i wrong?

[GastonRiera]

Hi Ben,

Short answer: URL structure has too small of an impact on Google rankings.

Long answer:
I work in XXXL e-commerce and had similar discussions and eventually tested different approaches. We saw no gain in rankings nor in impressions.
Also, hired some of the world best agencies and consultants to help us out. They came to the same conclusion. We cannot argue the data of our experiments.

• Tested in different categories and in different countries.

There is also, the discussion that having a shorter URL helps in rankings has been addressed by John Mueller in some Google Webmaster Hangouts (currently can't find it), he said that it makes little to no difference. Instead of focusing on changing your internal systems and structures, use that energy and resources to improve user experience and content on the site.
There is a great possibility that your decline in Google traffic is due to other deeper issues. I'd suggest you and your team focus more on competitive analysis and trends on user behavior that trying to change the whole website URL structure.
A neat tip that I've sometimes been given is, check your internal linking. You might probably be linking too much or too little to your best pages.

As you may imagine, this is not a simple issue. There is no clear actionable and probably just one change won't revert that steady decline.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

[Nozzle]

We agree with Gaston. Our experience is that it almost is never worth the time to change URL structures on an established site. Instead, focus time and effort on creating more and better content, adding more internal links, and doing legit link building.

For example, we looked at this blog post, https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/blog/chasebaits-lure-range/, where you highlight four separate lures but you only link to one of the product pages instead of all four. Furthermore, you linked only once using a "Shop Now" button. We'd recommend adding another link to that product page linking the text of the name of the product somewhere above the "Shop Now" button within the content talking about that specific lure.