Is it wise decision to change URL structure in Magento?

Removed category and subcategory names from URLs. Is it fine for indexing?

[sepath]

Hi,
Is it a wise decision to change URL structure in Magento.

Have been using short product URLs in canonical tag. (URLs without category/sub-category name in URL).

Now for all category page URLs, I have removed sub-categories name from the URLs. In canonical also, using short URLs.

Old long category, sub-category URls are redirected 301 on new short URLs.

Is it is a good decision to improve the page level score for all categories and sub-categories?

Please suggest how much time Google can take to index all new short URLs and get ranking back. (even expecting better rankings because I category URLs are first level URLs.)

Thanks

[ergophobe]

I asked a similar question in the Google SEO forum a few months back. This will be helpful (I think)

Read this over first...
[webmasterworld.com...]

[sepath]

Have been observing drop in organic visits after this change (made this change 15 days back). I hope its normal and will get back the traffic back and then even better.

Thanks

[ergophobe]

Have you looked to see where the drops are? Which pages show the biggest loss? Are they product or category pages?