Having a logical site structure and URL structure that is easy to read by users and search engines is the first step. You should avoid putting everything under a subfolder like /products. In retail terms, that would be equivalent to a clothing store dumping all its items in one place and telling customers, “Go find whatever you want, it’s all there”. There are a few ways to mitigate this, such as awesome design, filters, and internal functionality. It might simplify the user journey. However, for bots crawling the site, an illogical or bad URL structure raises an alarm.
There is an entire area of research dedicated to information architecture (product hierarchy). To be safe, you should mirror the URL structure and product hierarchy as closely as possible. You may not always be able to achieve this, but you can come pretty close.
Say our client sells men’s sandals as one of its product categories. From a website hierarchy perspective,
it might look like this: Shop > Mens > Shoes & Footwear > Shoes.
Takeaway: By aligning your product hierarchy and URL structure and including great content like meta descriptions and title tags, you are sending strong signals to Google about what your product is and where to find it.
