category name in SEO URLs

http://www.ablackhorse.com/productcart/pc/viewCategories.asp?idCategory=434

With version 4.0 will this category display url be:

http://www.ablackhorse.com/productcart/pc/pet-products

 

Aside from the duplicate content issue, which is a serious SEO issue Google make no bones about, I'm also concerned about the URL directory structure here.

 

I was discussing it with an SEO guy today (trained at StomperNet, which I have a lot of respect for), and I learned that there was more to this than I had been thinking.

 

I had beening thinking that Google PR had to do with clicks away from the home page and that there is a modicum of keyword relavance when the searched for keywords exist in the URL. And while there is some truth to that, here is a more important factore for Google -- the directory structure as they use it to interpret Information Architecture.

 

That is, Google looks at the directory structure and makes some assumtions that the more slashes there are from the root, the more "buried" in the site this content is, and therefore the less relevant it really is. StomperNet has tested this and found it to be true and recommends that one really never go more than three subdirectories deep from the web root for an important content.

 

What is more, PC really exacerbates this with their directory structure which already forces two subdirectories in a URL.

 

All of this being said, I think are are potentially some serious concerns with your URL rewriting approach.

 

Looks to me like this thread could have a really good discussion about these SEO issues. And belive you me, I know how SEO can be maddening to try to figure out what is the real answer to many SEO questions. I always say that if you ask two SEO guys one question, you will get six answers, LOL!

 

Regarding your question about which category name would be displayed for a product in multiple categories, or the category vs. subcategory name, on our company's main (non-PC) site, here are multiple links to the same product, with the friendly URL stuff generated based on the path taken to reach the item if you started from the home page:

 

 

 

 

 

On the first one, I went to the DVD section, and clicked directly on the item

Second, DVD category, then Crochet subcat, then item

Third, Crochet category, then item

Fourth, Crochet, DVDs, then item

 

The .net code-behind uses the values passed in the URL to build the breadcrumb displayed on the product page.

 

We use the free DLL from www.urlrewriting.net with regular expressions to handle fiendly URLs. Our pattern is

 

Probably not the most elegant URL scheme, but this was our first major .net site (redesigning a 10-year-old standard ASP site), and the first time I've ever had to hand-roll SEO (instead of it coming from a CMS).