URL creation - simple or hierarchical

Question

I am launching an online store and I am wondering what will be more SEO friendly for the product page URL:
a) domain.com/category-name/product-name OR
b) domain.com/product-name
I already have URLs for product category pages with the format domain.com/category-name.

On the one hand, I heard (but cannot find evidence) that Google like hierarchies of trees in a URL (vote for "a"). On the other hand, although a longer URL can result in a lower density of the key cord, also "product_name" comes as the last part of the URL, so it is probably the least important (vote for "b"). Perhaps both options are equally effective for SEO?

PS. I know about the canonical URL, but it’s not, I don’t want / need both URL formats, I just want to choose the best one.

Answer 1

In my opinion, category-name/product-name can increase the amount of traffic compared to just the product name. Because the previous one has the advantage of two keywords, while the later version has one.

But this can affect the results when the user simply searches for the product-name . Because search engines will prefer the keyword that comes first in the URL. In this case, the product name wins category-name/product-name .

So, it depends on the product and the category you are going to use. How users will access the product. just a product or always with a category name. Just do a little keyword research and decide who to go with.

Answer 2

In my example with my client, including the category and product name in the URL, you will get much better SEO results. However, I have no empirical references. Keyword density landed about 9-11%.

Answer 3

a smaller url is better. difficult to manage as links grow.

so if you can do domain.com/product-name

nothing beats. and it looks great on search results.

Answer 4

The site URL structure should be as simple as possible:

Google Webmaster Central URL Structure Council

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76329 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html

Google highlights search terms if they appear in the URL.

In the words of Google:

"Although static URLs may have a slight advantage in terms of clicks because users can read URLs easily, the decision to use database-based websites does not mean a significant drawback in terms of indexing and ranking."

Answer 5

As stated https://stackoverflow.com/users/290503/iamgopal . Less is better. More importantly, if you use a category, and later you decide to place your product in a different category, you have changed the URL. What's bad, even if you redirect.

We have actually removed all categories from our URL (8 million products or so) in order to facilitate reclassification. We did not notice a significant downgrade after eliminating the redirect effect.