I have a client with a very large site and we're trying to figure out the best way to structure the URLs. Currently, all of the specific product pages are set up like this: www.domain.com/product-name We recently restructured the site to create new capabilities sections. At first, we were going to leave the URLs for the product pages the same, but we're wondering if it makes sense to be more descriptive now. For example: www.domain.com/capability/sub-category/product-name The main reason we're considering the second option is that it will make it easier for our CMS to automatically generate a site map and bread crumb trail. Also, our capabilities and sub-categories are our core keywords, so it would be another way to get them in the site. My main concern is if this will hurt our SEO because of the layer this page now falls on the site. For example, now it looks like a level 4 page rather than a level 2 page. Perhaps I'm overthinking this though since the product pages are generally branded product names. If we do change, we will of course setup 301 redirects for the old product pages. Any input would be extremely helpful.
Where the product page lives has less to do with the SEO of the product page than "where" the link to the product page is located. If your global navigation (top navigation) that appears on all pages of your site still link directly to the product page, it really doesn't matter what the actual URL is. The product page still has an inbound link (and therefore is passed PR and link text) from every page on your site. If, however, you swap out direct links to your product page in the global (top) navigation with links to the "capability" pages... and from the capability pages you have to link to the the "sub-categories" page... and from the sub-categories pages you have to click to to get to the product page, YES! You will be DRASTICALLY changing the SEO of your site. Those product pages truely WILL now be level 4 pages. They will have FAR fewer inbound links because they are no longer part of the global navigation. Google will see them as less important, and they "could" end up even getting deindexed over time. With this structure Google will likely now see your Capability pages as the most important pages on your site... your sub-categories pages as likely the 2nd most important set of pages or at least less important than the capability pages... and your actual product pages somewhere after the sub-category pages in importance. So it's your linking structure that will determine "how" this affects your rankings, NOT the actual URLs.
There are not currently any direct links to the product pages from the main navigation, except for a few "Highlighted Products" which are actually a flash piece on the homepage. If you went to the site as it stands today, you would need to use the following path to find the product pages: Products > Product Type > Individual Product Page Users will now have two ways of navigating to these pages on the new site: Product > Product Type -or- Capability > Sub-Capability The main reason we've used shorter URLs in the past is that we often insert these in our print ads. For important products, our print/online campaigns already drive a lot of traffic to these pages. Also, these pages are really only optimized towards the product name. The "Capabilities" section is optimized towards keyword phrases with much higher search volume than the individual products, so we want Google to give this section greater wait. I would assume that if people know to type in our specific product names, they're going to get to our site anyway. The Capabilities section is setup to drive traffic from people are not aware of the company and it's products.
Sounds like they went from being level 3 pages to level 4 pages worse case... But as long as the search engines can still find the pages in 2 clicks from the home page using the Product - > product type -> individual product page navigation, it sounds like you will be ok. My point was that it's based more on how many clicks away form the home page your product pages are... not on how many folder names or '/'s are in the URLs. I do this a different way... I don't care where my product landing page lives (lt could be at http://www.example.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/folder5/my-landing-page.html), I can still use http://www.example.com/myproduct as the shortened URL in print ads. Simply set up a 301 redirect from /myproduct (the short URL) to /folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/folder5/my-landing-page.html (where it really lives). This is cake if you're hosted on an Apache webserver. in your root .htaccess simply include: Then people can use the short URL from the print ads but be redirected immediately to the appropriate place.