Magento – Removing Product URL Keys

Catalog URL Rewrite is a heavy index to run if you have thousands of skus. I'd recommend setting it to update manually not on save. You can do this programatically in your import script. Then have your import script run the index once when it's done importing all the products. You can also have your import script set the index mode back to "update on save" after it has run the index manually.

As for the "-1" on the end of urls. I've seen this happen in different configurations, particularly if you have a flat product catalog without unique category names in the urls. There have been some bugs with this behavior in different versions of Magento. The worst we found is that those number would increment with each index run. So one day the page is shoes-1.html, the next it's shoes-2.html, etc. Definitely do some testing on that if the pages are public. If everything stays a private sale this may not be critical for now. But do resolve this because as the url keys change, the records for the old url keys remain. This will also contribute to bad performance as you can easily get millions of unneeded core_url_rewrite rows over time.

What you want can't be achieved - afaik.

The problem is, that magento is planned with "product in many categories". The problem now is magento doesn't prefer any category and instead it shows no category at all.

The categories are used, when you click throught the categories, this is the only place (afaik) where the category rewrites are used.

But I think you can achieve what you want, by hacking a little bit the rewrite system and just make sure to load a category rewrite and not the one without all categories.

The next problem then is, that you have to make sure, that google still gets every time the same canonical url or you'll get a problem with duplicate content...

And the last think I have in mind: I'm not sure, wether this is a good idea from a SEO point of view. I'm no seo expert, but some one said to me, the shorter the url, the better...