Which URL structure is better?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Chris Boggs: as long as you are consistent and set canonical in case of other urls being generated, you should be good. In each of these examples you go from top-down hierarchy-wise. If you had /product/category/ or /product/shop/ it could get confusing. 2 levels is generally better than 3 if you can avoid your second example.
  
  
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  Ryan Jones: It depends. If you have products in multiple categories it creates some tricky canonical situations
  
  
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  Iulia Radu: Ryan Jones so what would ypu recommend? To me having website address/product category/product seems tge best. But having tried to set that up in permanent links and ruined the blog page and contact page, made me think how to do it better.
  
  
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  Ryan Jones: you definitely want product category pages for SEO, that`s super helpful for a lot of things - so if that makes sense for you, go for it. Just be mindful to try to make sure you canonical everything properly so you don`t have the same product showing up in google with multiple URLs. as for how to do it in wordpess, no idea.
  
  
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  Michael Stricker: Ryan Jones makes a good point here. I’ve seen Ecomms rewrite URLs to flat domain/product while retaining cat/sub-cat structure right up to that crawl point. Was it marginally faster? user friendlier perhaps did it aid Search visibility? Yeah, in the midst of dozens of other optimizations. In the end, the structure is minor... the consistency and directives & canons are more important.
  
  
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  Ryan Jones: Michael Stricker I`ve done this on a couple of ecomm sites for big brands. It worked a LOT better cuz you didn`t have to worry about people linking to products the wrong way from all the various pages they create every day.
  
  
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  Michael Stricker: Ryan Jones excellent point - munged links can be a big issue with many hands!
  
  
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  Iulia Radu: Ryan Jones I don`t have any 2 products with the same name so I should be fine.