Best URL Structure for Product Pages?
-
I am happy with my URLs and my ecommerce site ranks well over all, but I have a question about product URL's. Specifically when the products have multiple attributes such as "color".
I use a header URL in order to present the 'style' of products,
www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-LIST
and I allow each 'color' to have it's own URL so people can send or bookmark a specific item.
www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-ANCH1
www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-WRCH1
I use a rel canonical to show that the header URL is the URL search engines should be indexing and to avoid duplicate content issues from having the exact same info, MP3's, PDF's, Video's accessories, etc on each specific item URL. I also have a 'noindex no follow' on the specific item URL.
These header URLs rank well, but when using tools like SEOMoz, which I love, my header pages fail for using rel canonical and 'noindex no follow'
I've considered only having the header URL, but I like the idea of shoppers being able to get to the specific product URL.
Do I need the no index no follow? Do I even need the rel canonical? Any suggestions?
-
thanks again!
-
I'd just keep the general ROBOTS variant and drop the ID:
The id="" shouldn't hurt, but it may be messing with our crawlers (Google should be ok). The additional GOOGLEBOT directive is repetitive.
-
I'm looking at the id= reference. I have:
<meta id="ctl00_robots" name="ROBOTS" content="robots" /><meta id="ctl00_googlebot" name="GOOGLEBOT" content="googlebot" />
What would you change that to?
-
Thank you, I appreciate the time you spend to understand and answer my question!
-
I think that canonicalizing the colors/variations back up to the "root" product is a good bet - while those color variations are technically unique, they can look like thin content to Google, especially at a large scale. A couple of suggestions, though:
(1) I wouldn't use the canonical tag AND Meta Robots (noindex) - it could confuse the crawlers. In this case, since there are separate URLs for the colors/variations and people might link to those, I'd just keep the canonical and drop the Meta Robots.
(2) I think our crawler might be tripping up on the id="" reference in the Meta Robots tag, but I'm not 100% sure. That shouldn't be an issue for Google, although I try to keep those tags free of ids and other extra attributes.
(3) In general, you don't need a Meta Robots tag for all bots and Googlebot separately (especially if the behaviors are the same). I don't think it's a problem here, but it's not necessary.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Page that appears on SERPs is not the page that has been optimized for users
This may seem like a pretty newbie question, but I haven't been able to find any answers to it (I may not be looking correctly). My site used to rank decently for the KW "Gold name necklace" with this page in the search results:http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=302This was the page that I was working on optimizing for user experience (load time, image quality, ease of use, etc.) since this page was were users were getting to via search. A couple months ago the Google SERP's started showing this page for the same query (also ranked a little lower, but not important for this specific question):http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=314Which is a white gold version of the necklaces. This is not what most users have in mind (when searching for gold name necklace) so it's much less effective and engaging.How do I tell Google to go back to old page/ give preference to older page / tell them that we have a better version of the page / etc. without having to noindex any of the content? Both of these pages have value and are for different queries, so I can't canonical them to a single page. As far as external links go, more links are pointing to the Yellow gold version and not the white gold one.Any ideas on how to remedy this?Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Don340 -
Title Tags & Url Structure
So I'm working on a website for a client in the Tourism Industry. We've got a comprehensive list of museums & other attractions in a number of cities that have to go online. And we have to come up with the correct url structure, title tags and obviously content. My current line of thought was to work the urls in the following way. http://domain.com/type-of-attraction/city/name-of-attraction/ This is mainly because we think that the type of attraction is far more important then the city (SEO wise) as the country as a whole receives more searches, however we require a city in the url to make it unique because some attractions across cities happen to share names and we don't want to have the names of attractions littered with city names. However for title-tags I wanted to go the other way around, again due to the attraction type being more important then the city. Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction - City - Brand Name or Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction in City - Brand Name I am quite confident in working it this way; however I would appreciate if I receive some feedback on this structure, you think its good or you would make any suggestions / alterations. One last thing, There's the possibility of having many urls ending up with the same city names (For each type of attraction) I would think that just providing a list of links & duplicate text is not enough; would you suggest a canonical pointing to a link containing just information on the city? and using the other pages for user-navigation only? or should i set variables in the text which are replaced by the types of attraction so that the text looks different for each one?
Technical SEO | | jonmifsud0 -
Are you allowed to point different urls to same page
hi, i have some urls that i am either going to put on hold or thinking about pointing to one of my sites. what it is, i am looking at re-designing the pages but not until next year, so i thought i would point some of the urls to a site that i am happy with to different pages, but not sure if i am allowed this or not so for example, if i have a site on cars, and one of the url is www.rovercars.co.uk i was thinking about pointing it to the page that is about rover cars. can anyone let me know if this is allowed or not please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Updating content on URL or new URL
High Mozzers, We are an event organisation. Every year we produce like 350 events. All the events are on our website. A lot of these events are held every year. So i have an URL like www.domainname.nl/eventname So what would you do. This URL has some inbound links, some social mentions and so on. SO if the event will be held again in 2013. Would it be better to update the content on this URL or create a new one. I would keep this URL and update it because of the linkvalue and it is allready indexed and ranking for the desired keyword for that event. Cheers, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Landing Page URL Structure
We are finally setting up landing pages to support our PPC campaigns. There has been some debate internally about the URL structure. Originally we were planning on URL's like: domain.com /california /florida /ny I would prefer to have the URL's for each state inside a "state" folder like: domain.com /state /california /florida /ny I like having the folders and pages for each state under a parent folder to keep the root folder as clean as possible. Having a folder or file for each state in the root will be very messy. Before you scream URL rewriting :-). Our current site is still running under Classic ASP which doesn't support URL rewriting. We have tried to use HeliconTech's ISAPI rewrite module for IIS but had to remove it because of too many configuration issues. Next year when our coding to MVC is complete we will use URL rewriting. So the question for now: Is there any advantage or disadvantage to one URL structure over the other?
Technical SEO | | briankb0 -
I am trying to correct error report of duplicate page content. However I am unable to find in over 100 blogs the page which contains similar content to the page SEOmoz reported as having similar content is my only option to just dlete the blog page?
I am trying to correct duplicate content. However SEOmoz only reports and shows the page of duplicate content. I have 5 years worth of blogs and cannot find the duplicate page. Is my only option to just delete the page to improve my rankings. Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Product category paging
Hi, My product categories have 2-3 pages each. I have paging implemented with rel=next and rel=prev. from some reason Google GWT now reports the pages as having duplicate titles and description. Should I be worried? Should I set a different title like "blue category - page x" ? Thanx, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0