The value of changing URL structure

[stepsstones]

Dear Moz members,

There have been many questions on this forum on this topic but I cannot find one that completely answers my question.

We launched our new website about 7 months ago and the website contains around 3.000 product pages. The average page authority of the product pages is quite still quite low (12). The URL structure is built like this: www.website.com/catalog/ID/productname/ (with right keywords in the product name). So e.g the current URL is

Our competitors rank higher on certain keywords while page authority (and DA) are significantly lower. Their URL structure is set up like this: www.website.com/productname/. Our most import keyword is "grafmonumenten" and the link we would like to rank on is: https://www.denhollandsche.nl/grafmonumenten/

My question now is:
1: how important is the length/depth of the URL structure?
2: is it beneficial for us to change the structure (www.website.com/productname/) use permanent redirects? My expierence is that changing the 'page url' can cause a short term drop in the serps, but can have positive effects on the longer term.

Thanks for helping me out!

[stepsstones]

Dear Devanur, Yiannis,

Thanks a lot for your thorough argumentation on this. There are a few competitors that use the folders in the URL for keyword spamming purposes and I definitely don't want to pursue such a strategy. As the authority is at quite a low level, I prefer optimizing the site structure right now instead of waiting another year. Especially as most pages don't rank to well currently.

Again, thanks a lot for your help guys!

Best regards,

Martijn

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi there, the length/depth of the URL structure is very important. The deeper it is, the harder it would be to rank high in the search engines. This also depends on how authoritative the domain is and other factors like the page authority itself.

It is highly recommended to place the resources as close as possible to the root by eliminating unnecessary folders.

If possible, I personally would recommend you to go with a shorter URL structure and as you mentioned, you can deploy a 301 permanent redirection mechanism to pass on the SEO goodies to the new URLs. You can expect a temporary loss in rankings but everything should be fine within 3 to 6 weeks. Also while restructuring the URLs, please take enough care not to include anything that does not convey a clear hierarchy. The URLs should be as short as possible and contain the target keywords/phrases with word separators like hyphens (these are recommended over others like an underscore). Those were my two cents. Good luck my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[artdivision]

Hello,

First of all and as an advise I would use 301 only to good/high traffic pages and not to every single page. I suspect you run an ecommerce site and I have  bad experience by changing url structures to similar sites, specially the ones that uses widgets for products so the less the better (if ofcourse that is the case).

Shortening your URL length will definitely help you and I see no harm in it. Matt Cutts in particular said that if there are more than 5 words "[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.”

In regards to the depth, the closer your keyword is to the domain name the more weight and important it will be considered by google. So for example if you are selling running shoes and right now your url is

www.website.com/catalog/ID/running-shoes then you should make it
www.website.com/running-shoes

I am not an expert with ID though so maybe someone else can jump in and give us insights but I think the example above will be a good change.

Hope this helps