SEO effects of changing the URL path to make segmentation in analytics easier

Question

I am having an e-commerce site and current URL structure is like this:

• www.example.com/category1 [Category landing page]
• www.example.com/category1/sub-category [sub-category listing page]
• www.example.com/category1/sub-category/product-name [Product Details page]

I am finding it difficult to identify from the URLs whether the URL is category landing page or a listing page or a product details page (primarily in Google Analytics). To solve this problem, I am thinking of adding qualifiers in the URL as follows:

• www.example.com/category1/cat-land [Category landing page]
• www.example.com/category1/sub-category/cat-list [sub-category listing page]
• www.example.com/category1/sub-category/product-name/prod-details [Product Details page]

Original URLs would be redirected to new URLs using 301 permanent redirect.

Would this have any negative effect on existing SEO and Google ranking?

Answer 1

You currently have the most probably perfect URLs structure for users and SEO. Therefore, if I were you I won't change them.

It's totally logical to get a sub categories listing on an URL like www.example.com/category1. It's just like you most probably have categories listing on www.example.com.

If you prefer, you can add a / to all your URLs to get URLs like this:

• www.example.com/category1/
• www.example.com/category1/sub-category/
• www.example.com/category1/sub-category/product-name/

In any way, in SEO and users points of view, remember more your URLs are short, more they're optimized. Indeed, if you add some characters in URLs, they are harder to remember for users and it attenuates the SEO weight of others keywords in URLs.