Wordpress Woocomerce Recommended SEO URL structure

[well-its-1-louder]

Hi Mozzers !

Thanks for looking.

I have a new shop in development (http://www.vintageheirloom.biz), I'm now using WordPress & Woocommerce.

I've asked Woocommerce whether it is possible to remove the 'shop' and 'product-category' categories. They say it is, but it isn't recommended, it can slow site speed & create possible duplicate pages.

I'm wondering what seasoned SEO experts opinions are on my particular structure? I've heard that a flat structure is recommended, but ecommerce shops as I understand pose their own issues, so any feedback would be appreciated.. Here's some URL examples:

http://vintageheirloom.biz/shop/bags/ - this for the category bags

http://vintageheirloom.biz/product-category/bags/shoulder-bags/ - this for shoulder bags a child of bags category

http://vintageheirloom.biz/shop/2-55-bags/vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-2-55-bag/ - a product

The last URL contains the category 2-55 bags. The products name also includes the phrases 2-55 bag. Should this level of repetition be avoided or is it best to keep the whole phrase 'vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-2-55-bag/' for SEO purposes?

Thanks for any help you can give me around this issue!

Kevin

[prima-253509]

Glad it was helpful!

If you are going to have a true blog then that is enough in order to segment it out. Having the date in there can be helpful to compare the hits you are getting to old blogs vs newer blogs (i.e. how long your content is staying relevant).

If you are going to have other types of content such as shopping guides / product comparisons / etc that are more "timeless" pieces of content then you might want to think about the kinds of articles you are going to write and create prefixes that match those types of articles.

You could definitely do product guides and product comparisons in a blog but it can be harder to segment out if it is just "blog".

Hope that helps. Cheers!

[well-its-1-louder]

Joshua,

Many thanks, that really is helpful.

When you mention a prefix for the blog, would simply adding blog be ok?

http://vintageheirloom.biz/blog/2013/08/vintage-heirloom-turns-4/

Thanks for the links I'm off to have a look !

Cheers !

[well-its-1-louder]

Thanks Jon,

We get vintage bags, mostly unique but not always, e.g. we get several vintage Celine box bags over the year,  so we do get duplicate titles and do need to add a serial number.

Biz is my dev area, but thanks for the info !

[prima-253509]

One thing to keep in mind with the urls is how you can segment them in analytics for easy data analysis. You want them to be semantic and pretty but also easily segmented. I would encourage you to think about how you will be able to segment your urls in analytics so that you can easily see patterns in how people are browsing the site and what types of pages are successful.

For instance we have the following url structures for brands, equipment, replacement parts, and a learning center.

• brand/[brand-name]
• equipment/type/[category] - for the categorization of equipment
• equipment/brand/[product] - for easy segmentation of products
• part/type/[category]
• part/brand/[part]
• learn/[cat]
• learn/article/[article-title]

This gives us a lot of flexibility in moving products around in the menu system without messing up urls while still being semantic, and allowing for easy segmentation in analytics. For instance, with this setup we can see if people prefer navigating by equipment catalog or by brand. It also allows us to easily pull out the learning center articles and all the visit we get to them to see how eCommerce only visits are doing.

One thing I would suggest with your blog is to have some kind of prefix that allows you to easily exclude those pages (or only include those pages) in analytics. If you simply go by year without a prefix it will be harder to segment out the data.

You should check out a mozinar that Moz did with Everett Sizemore that deals with a lot of these issues (he specifically talks about SEO and url structure).

Also, you probably have already seen this, but yoast's plugin for wordpress will allow you to remedy much of the duplicate content that wordpress can create.

Cheers!

[driftingbass]

You should ideally be able to write unique titles for every product and post without the need for serial numbers or dates to prevent duplication. But it won't do any harm to have the date in your post URLs if you want to.

I'd look at whether you can get a different domain to .biz as they aren't considered as trustworthy by web users.

[well-its-1-louder]

Thanks for this Jon,

I tweaked the perma links and now have this for a product:

http://vintageheirloom.biz/shop/vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-2-55-bag/

It's a bit closer to the so named 'flat structure' and I think the URL still contains the reference that it is a 2.55 bag, hopefully this works. I'll get around duplications by adding a serial number or unique database number at the end.

We are blogging too so it might be worth keeping these categories, could avoid potential issues down the road.

I did notice I have a very flat structure for our blogs e.g.

http://vintageheirloom.biz/vintage-bamboo-gucci-bags/

This looks like it could lead to duplicates, so I've changed it to:

http://vintageheirloom.biz/2013/07/vintage-bamboo-gucci-bags/

Would you agree this is better?

Thanks

[driftingbass]

What you have looks fine to me, I don't think there will be an issue with repeating 2-55 bags in the product title as it would be useful for differentiating that bag from another bag of the same name that isn't a 2-55, eg vintage-chanel-caviar-skin-bag.

You could definitely remove the /shop/ or /product-category/ if your site is a shop and nothing else. If you have a blog, and want a 'bags' category then keeping /product-category/ might be preferable to avoid confusion and potential duplication.