Hi Kevin,
Their first point is effectively solved with good site management.
The second related to performance – I have clients running this solution who have perfect page speed/Core Web Vitals scores, so I don’t believe it’s a huge issue.

https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/

Why do you feel this is necessary and how do you avoid conflicts?

You’re welcome Luna.

I completely agree with you Tom. Not to mention the plugin hasn’t been updated for a year now. I will be updating the post to reflect the better solution.

Hi Carlos, do you have any plugins installed for your url structure?
You are missing the canonical link element which is a big problem, as this prevents duplicate pages from multiple paths being indexed.
Woocommerce doesn’t behave how your site is behaving by default, so I presume you have some customisation / plugins going on there.
Feel free to drop me an email at info@matt-jackson.com and I may be able to assist further.

If you have a moment, I’d love it if you would look at this post and advise.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/help-question-on-canonical-to-avoid-duplicate-content-with-google/#new-topic-0

Ultimately we have a site with many products and each product has multiple categories. We always want to see the URL change correctly with the main/subcategory URL structure -however, we dont’ want Google to ding us for what they may perceive as a duplicate content.

I explain it more on the forum post but I am thinking this is what your main subject is on your post. I just need someone to confirm this with me. Please 😉

I hope to hear back from you. Thanks so much, Matt.

Hi Luca, although it may create duplicate “paths”, they should all have the same canonical url, which means there is never duplicate content within Google.

Having checked your website I can see that it works fine, perhaps you could be more specific, so that I can check further…

Best Regards