It would be nice if the category’s products were sorted randomly so that the pages content appeared to be different every time a customer visited. I believe this would also be advantageous for SEO as well. This would be very important for businesses that have a large number of products in their categories.
One of my customers categories has 63 pages in it. Unfortunately, it can’t be subdivided very easily. As you can imagine it is very unlikely that the majority of those pages will ever be viewed unless approached directly from a search engine.
Randomizing would effectively cycle the items through the first pages, and (in theory) prompt search engines to visit more often as the random content would appear that the pages are frequently updated. The customer would still have the option to manually sort the category by price, part number etc.
It will also give you a low page rank for any page thats not your home page,
confuse the **** outta the search engines when visitors looks for a specific keyword, click on the link and find an error page greeting them (off they go)
Once a search engine has crawled pages it should be kept as the same name/url otherwise as I said, customers will get nothing but 404/error pages.
This same senario occurs when you move categories/products.
At the moment I have moved my entire stores architechture into Car → Model from Car → System(cooling/engine) and have lost a lot of customers as they can’t be stuffed re-searching the same product again.
I understand that you may have your reason and am just adding my view.
The category page names/links would remain the same. I’m just talking about how the products in them would be sorted. I read somewhere that frequent content changes were beneficial for SEO and prompted more attention from search engines. I can’t validate that claim, but what I read was along those lines. I’ll see if I can’t find any information online to validate that claim. I don’t see why you would get any 404 responses or broken links as the pages wouldn’t change, only the content.