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I'm currently in the process of developing a website for a client, and we're having disagreement on the url format for the site. I am recommending he do a format such as this:

siteroot/brand/<brandName>#<categoryName>
siteroot/category/<categoryName>/<subcategoryName>#<brandName>

He is wanting to have everything directly off of the main page

siteroot/<brandName>#<categoryName>
siteroot/<categoryName>/<subcategoryName>#<brandName>

Personally, I'm not seeing anything wrong with having the simple identifier in the URL, as it helps to separate the two varying results, but I could be wrong. Does anyone have any suggestions or advice as to which would be a better format to use and why?

P.S. There are obviously other pages on the site, but they are minimal and make sense. This is our biggest disagreement.

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2 Answers

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Matt Cutts and Yoast go over the best practices for URL structures on this page which includes two videos from Matt Cutts at Google http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-url-permalink/

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up vote 3 down vote

The advantage of the your recommendation is that it tells the user "we organise our site in two ways, by brand and by category". It also prevents confusion if (depending just on what you're selling) brands and categories have similar or identical names.

It also lets you create a page at siteroot/brand which contains a list of brands, and similarly with categories. If people are having trouble finding what they want then they can go to those pages and get an overview of what's available.

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An example of a site which uses a brand page if you will as a main category page is http://www.zappos.com/d-g this page is for the D&G brand, from here you can navigate to sub categories. You also have the option to view all brands alphabetically at zappos.com/brands but no URL actually contains the word brand or category. – Anagio Mar 7 '12 at 12:21

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