Woocommerce url structure best practice

Essien

Lets say I have a woocommerce site called www .hats.com.

By default, woocommerce generates the following structure for product categories...

www .hats.com/product-category/mens-hats/

And for individual products...

www .hats.com/product/mens-cowboy-hat/

I have 2 questions...

1) Is there any/much SEO value in removing the /product/ /product-category/ prefixes from the url structure, or maybe changing them to something else?

2) If I were to remove/change them would this have any knock on effect on the rest of the website? (Obviously assuming I didn't create any other posts or pages with the same URL).

To be honest, I'm only guessing they can be changed at all without having really looked into it, since I know I can do it with other custom post types I assume the same would apply here.

Thanks in advance.

blue4ever

I’ve been down this road, albeit with a different e-comm CMS, but the principle is the same in the main.
I’d not be spending too much time on the /products/ dilemma –if your products are categorised with a prefix of /products/ you can try and remove them – but in the greater scheme of things it not ‘huge’ – with e-comm there are other considerations. But before leaving that, I opted for a kind of breadcrumb URL structures
www .hats.com//mens-hats/mens-cowboy-hat/red-hat
But that’s just my take.

One of the real probs I found, a woo might had an out of the box solution was where your “red cowboy hat” can be accessed via another route like tags for example
www .hats.com/red-hats/mens cawboy-hat
[the url above is poor but you get the drift]

Then you’re exposing yourself to duplicate content. So you have to code your site so that any ‘secondary’ urls – ie urs derived for say a tag, search, other route, defer to the ‘primary’ product as the default page via something like:
<link rel="canonical" href="http www .hats.com//mens-hats/mens-cowboy-hat/red-hat.html" />

Another one to overcome is thin content – which a lot of sites are – that’s self explanatory- and not easily surmounted.

Finally on my trip down recent memory lane – use and tag the backend with structured data. It’s really very important and G seems to like it.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2650907?hl=en

Really finally, sort it that all your page titles are different as are your descriptions – even marginally.

C

Essien

Thanks, I just saw this as a relatively easy fix which might be worth going for if it had value.

In fairness though, there's a practically endless line of other issues that could be dealt with too, some of which you've pointed out above. Thin content, structured data and correct use of titles and descriptions are right up there.