Remove base for category permalink in woocommerce

I have this idea that longer URI path, or deeper “file hierarchy” would have a negative SEO impact. But recently John Mueller made a statement that URI length did not have any negative SEO impact. The most important thing is that your important page are easily accessible to the search engine, and probably to your customer too.

In this article, Search Engine Journal speaks about length and recommend to keep it short but it’s an extrapolation on what J. Mueller said regarding URI longer than 1000 characters may not be a good practice (which is different from: “the shorter, the better”).

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-john-mueller-recommends-keeping-urls-under-1000-characters/318739/#:~:text=Google’s%20John%20Mueller%20recently%20stated,under%201%2C000%20characters%20in%20length.&text=With%20that%20said%2C%20it’s%20generally,than%20they%20need%20to%20be.

In a more recent tweet, John was clear about that point:

URL length is not a ranking fraction.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 5, 2020

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-url-length-seo-28952.html

Given that woocommerce does not recommend to remove the product-category base from the permalinks and that there is no clear SEO SEO advantage to it, then there is no reason to implement this feature.

If anything you can implement the option to have the product category included in your product permalink for SEO purpose. Having the product category in your URL might help google identify which category your product belong to and helped it rank for those keywords.