Adding a Cart and Planning for Long Term Google Traffic

[burcot]

I have a site that is averaging 1k uniques per day. I am about to install a shopping cart and would really appreciate some advice on site hierachy.

The existing informational content uses wordpress but the cart will use a different cms.

I am interested in your opinions on the best way to implement this with long term Google ranking the main consideration.

These are the two structures I think I have to choose from

1) example.com/shop/category/product
This would allow me to maintain existing ranking but the cart would start 1 folder deep

2) example.com/category/product
This would mean burying the existing content 1 folder and rewriting existing urls but the cart would be one click closer

So the informational content would look like this..domain.com/information/category

Would you risk the existing traffic to favour long term commercial Google traffic

[edited by: tedster at 5:10 pm (utc) on Mar 2, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

Stay with the approach that maintains your existing page addresses - I am most most definite about that. Cool URIs Don't Change" [w3.org]

the cart would be one click closer

The number of clicks needed to get there doesn't have to be tied to the apparent directory structure - you can put any URL you want in any anchor tag oin any page. Also don't give any concern to the "number of slashes" in the URL - that's not a ranking factor. Focus on the click path.