At the moment I’m working on SEO for different WooCommerce shops.
I know that Google likes “simple to understand urls “.
In the search results of Google I often see simple urls for product category pages from other shop systems, like: www.exampleshop.com/cars/sport-cars/ferrari. In WooCommerce the url would look like this: www.exampleshop.com/product-category/cars/sport-cars/ferrari.
I think removing the “product-category” slug would definitely be a SEO improvement. On the WooThemes Doc page I read that removing this slug isn’t good for WordPress and it would be hard for it to detect whether the site is a normal page or the actual product category.
Recently I saw the plugin “Perfect SEO Url” it says it removes the slugs and the shop will work without duplicate content and old urls get automatically redirected to the new one. What do you think about? Will this plugin cause problems on the WordPress system? Should I remove this slugs to get the best SEO results? My shop is in a branch of industry where every SEO improvement is very important because the competition is pretty strong.
Removing those url’s is definitely one of the major improvements in search engine optimization for any online store because then search engines will not take into account the unnecessary words in the link. So, the search for your products will become more precise. I also encountered this problem and tested most of the plugins that were available on the WordPress website. Now I definently can recomend Permalink Manager by Premmerce because it’s free, very user friendly and simple plugin.
You can donload it in Wodpress site here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/woo-permalink-manager/