Hi Abbas,

The answer depends on whether you want to rank for “Women’s underwear” or not. The second structure allows for that. But in general, either would be fine as long as you internally link properly to show hierarchy between categories.

site.com/women/lingerie/
site.com/women/lingerie-set/

compared to the structure below, which one do you recommend?

site.com/women/underwear/lingerie/
site.com/women/underwear/lingerie-set/

i think that first structure is better, because:
– It doesn’t cause credit to be divided into a higher category.
– we have a shorter url.
– the content of the categories can be written in a better way so that it doesn’t cause duplicate pages. because the higher category itself somehow contains the subject.

do you recommend that the depth of the main and sub-categories goes up to more than one level?
Thanks.

Hi Holger,

If you really didn’t want the products to rank and compete with the categories, then putting them deep within the structure would likely solve that problem.

I could also imagine if you can’t add custom breadcrumbs, then a deep structure would create good internal links to categories via breadcrumbs without having to do any extra work.

Could you imagine a use case where it still could be beneficial to create a deep silo structure? We were aware of (way) shorter directories many shops use. We also knew that Google doesn’t use directory structures to “understand” site structure…

Still, an experienced E-Commerce SEO advised us to build a very detailed structure for category pages. Many URLs have 2-3 directories, but in rare occasions we have 6 levels (products are in a /p/ directory almost on root).

Approaching the relaunch (where these URLs would go live) another SEO strongly advised against using our structure. The first SEO is no longer available to ask.

Could you imagine his reasoning?

Thanks for the reply Matt! Appreciate it.

Tom

Hi Tom,

As long as users can clearly find the menu item they’re looking for, and it’s somewhat relevant to the target page, then you should be fine.

EG if it’s clearly under a sub-section called “Design” in a mega menu, then listing it as “Forest”, “Modern”, etc will likely be ok. Make sure to double check it’s as clear on mobile.

great article, thank you for that! There’s few articles with this much value out there. I have a local Shopify store but now I’m going international with a Laravel site under a new brand. I have the structure figured out, but I’m still left wondering one thing I did not manage to find an answer to online. Here it is: Do the names/titles of my menu items have to be the same as in the URL?

Let’s say I sell designs on my website. I have unique product names that I know people don’t search for. Instead, they search for my category names (“forest design”, “modern design”, etc.). That’s why I name my category names that way… I include that name in the page title and in the URL – but do I have to include the whole thing in the menu? Because I just end up with the word “design” being pasted 10 times over the drop-down menu. I’d much rather have menu items say just “forest”, “modern”, etc.
Can this cause issues for the site?

The site is pretty flat, not a lot of categories or sub-categories, and not a lot of products (50 in total, will be maximum 80 down the road).

Thanks! Kind regards, Tom

From a ranking perspective, product pages are more likely to rank in search results if they don’t have the sub-category in the URL.

Depending on the CMS, you can have the products show in a sub-category through internal navigation, then canonical link back to the root domain version.

Hi Joshua,
For sub-categories, it’s to avoid them cannibalising the main category, but feel free to test it in your situation to see which is most effective.
For certain keywords, the sub-category can end up outranking the main category for the head term, and having them as a sub-category urls helps to prevent this somewhat.
For products I recommend having them off the root domain (as mentioned in the post).
If you have any other questions, feel free to email me info@matt-jackson.com