Impact of below URL structure for eCommerce Site (in terms of SEO)

Question

Currently we are thinking of two possible URL structures for Products page and Product Detail Page and which one should we go with ?

1st Approach:

/products/ - Displays Products
/product/<product-slug> - Display Product Details
/product/ - Redirect to Products (Can someone shed light on redirecting
            directory but not pages underneath it, Is this acceptable?) 

2nd Approach:

/products/ - Display Products
/products/product/<product-slug> - Display Product Details 

We like 1st approach as it makes URL shorter and easy to remember/type but concerned about redirect.

Answer 1

Just use /products/ for the main page and /products/* for item pages.
You're just complicating things unnecessarily. Unless there's more reasoning you're not bringing up.

Answer 2

Ask yourself this: Would it make sense for Google/Yahoo!/Bing to rank one higher than the other?

Or, alternatively, As a search user, would I want Google/Yahoo!/Bing to rank one higher than the other?

If the answer is "no", then the search engines probably came to the same conclusions as well.

This doesn't preclude some algorithmic quirks due to implementation causing one to have a slight advantage over the other in a particular search engine, but there's still no sense in website owners obsessing over microoptimizations like these, since:

• search algorithms are constantly changing, evolving and being improved upon; any such unintentional biases aren't liable to persist
• quirks in one engine could very well be balanced out by the opposite behavior in another (or in the same engine 2 months from now)
• it diverts energy from much more valuable/influential ranking factors

It's much better to invest in value-add improvements that have much more significant and longterm SEO benefits.

That said, /products/product/<product-slug> is pretty useless.

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Edit:

The same applies to redirects. Google won't penalize you for redirects so long as you're using them correctly. If /products/ 301 redirects to /product/, then there will be no penalty. It's the proper way to maintain canonicity when you want users to be able to access a document from multiple URLs.

Redirecting the parent directory but not the URLs under it won't have any impact on SEO, only usability. Users may type /products/<product-slug> expecting to go to /product/<product-slug> and instead get a 404. Though, as usual, poor usability can end up indirectly affect SEO since this could cause you to lose some backlinks (as well as sales).