Ecommerce Link Juice and Canonical URLs
-
Hello all. I am optimising an E-Commerce site and I have a questions about Products in several categories & Canonical URL's. Using Magento Platform.
site.com/category1/product1/ ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/product1/ ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 ( link from category is the same , as is the canonical URL )
site.com/product1/ ( this is where other categories link to )Canonical links for all the above is site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 which takes care of duplicate content correctly.
I just wonder if we would get more link juice if ALL the links from all categories went to site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 ( instead of some going to site.com/product1/ )
Thanks in advance
-
Thank you for confirming my thoughts. In the meantime, that's exactly what we've implemented anyway
It didn't seem logical to me either - nice to have a sounding board over here.
-
Why would you canonically link Product pages to the category page? Of course that is going to disappear the product pages. Why not just link from the product pages to category pages with a normal link <a>to increase page authority on the category page?</a>
-
Hey Guys
I'm sure I stumbled across a Q&A about canonically linking product pages to appropriate category pages, the theory being that 25 product pages canonically linking to the relevant category page should increase the authority of the category page. By extension, that means that product pages never show up in SERPS, which I'm not quite so keen on.
I'll be damned if I can find the thread, even with a search engine
Any advice or tales of woe gratefully received.
-
I completely agree. 1 URL is by far the better choice.
-
I still think the better option is to have 1 URL. I was using the root URL for products ( effectively 1 URL ) and not having the category in the URL and my SEO was doing well - BUT I wanted the Categories to be displayed in Google as clickable - so I changed to the canonical method having different URLs with 1 Canonical. Over a couple of months my SEO suffered terribly - some categories in the top 10 down to 20-30 . I have just implemented having 1 URL ( with category in it ) - we will see how we go..
-
Hello Yusuf,
If you have a link to Jon Mueller saying that, instead of someone else saying he did, I would love to go check it out because the statement is in direct opposition to the one on Google's website here, which says:
"Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to
http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD
get consolidated with links tohttp://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html
."Notice is says "helps" though. As always, the directive is a "hint" to Google, which has the right to ignore the hint if they want to.
-
Thanks - yes I am actually seeing this first hand.
I used the canonical method - and it is rapidly degrading my SEO . not hugely , but some things that were almost on page 1 are now at the end of page 1 / beginning of page 2. I am currently changing everything to have 1 URL ( with the category this time )
-
Hi Everett,
Thanks for your response.
I also believed that the rel=canonical merge the link profiles but so far all the evidence I've seen suggests that it doesn't.
Firstly - Jon Mueller from Google stated that the rel=canonical tag doesn't merge the link profile. That's talked about here.
http://moz.com/community/q/quick-rel-canonical-link-juice-question
Secondly, if I look at some examples, you'd expect pages with rel=canonical tags to have zero authority etc. reported for page alternatives in Open Site Explorer.
e.g. on the ASOS website there is a link to the men's section which uses a query string parameter.
http://www.asos.com/men/?via=top
The canonical url is
Both report different levels of authority. If the link profiles were merged, would you not expect either the same levels of authority reported or the non-canonical version to report no authority?
I understand that Moz tools don't work like Google so I'd like to hear from someone who can explain this.
Thanks,
Yusuf
-
Yusuf,
I do believe rel canonical tags merge the link profile of all non-canonical URLs to the one canonical URL.
Also, relying on redirects in this case could be problematic for breadcrumbs.
-
Hello Marty,
If you have the opportunity to use only ONE URL, to which you will link from all categories - and which will be the one and only canonical for that product - I would use site.com/product/product1. Note the use of a /product/ directory instead of being off the root. I find that having products in a product directory makes diagnoses of issues (i.e. index count, site:domain.com inurl:product searches, Analytics segmentation...) a lot easier. However, if you want to keep it site.com/product1 then that would be fine as well. It would be preferable to using multiple URLs and relying on 301 redirects or rel canonicals, which are effective band-aids, but band-aids nevertheless. It is better to actually fix the problem, which is products living on multiple URLs.
Of course you're going to still want to either 301 redirect or rel canonical the old ones to your canonical version since the URLs are likely already in Google's system and possibly have external links.
And you should think about what happens to breadcrumbs as well. If a user gets to /product1 from one category vs another, will their breadcrumb change and how will that be done? Is it ok for usability for the breadcrumb on that product page to always reference the canonical category (i.e. Home ---> category 2 ---> category2 ---> product1)? I tend to think so, and this also may help your internal linking be more consistent when Googlebot visits the page.
-
Thanks for your replys
- I'm not really asking the question whether it should be a 301 or Canonical - I have the opportunity to make all the links go directly to the correct URL - or to go to the category and use Canonical. ( then there would ony be one actual URL ) - just wondering if that is more beneficial as you would have 4-5 links going to the same product page instead of 1 going to the product page and the rest with Canonical URL's .
So if you have any more ideas...???
-
The canonical is the right way of setting the website up. When we take on an E-commerce client that has products accessible via multiple URL's is to Google which one has the authority, so if you are looking at product X then google it and see which URL Google is giving the authority to, look at the path then canonical all other variations to that path.
-
Hi
I've often wondered about this - whether to use a 301 or leave pages as they are and use the rel=canonical tag.
I would think that a 301 from the duplicate to preferred page would be best. This would mean that any inbound links will pass juice to the preferred page (i.e. site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1). The rel=canonical tag, as far as I know, does not merge the link profile of the duplicate pages.
However, depending on the skill of your developers, other rewrite/redirect rules on your site and your CMS - the rel=canonical might be the only feasible method.
This page explains it very nicely.
http://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use
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
-
How to determine if there are any back links still out there for my version 1 URL
My version 1 url was 301 redirected to version 2, years ago. If the version 1 is no longer contributing any SEO juice I would like to cancel that cancel that domain. Is there a way to know if the version 1 url still has any impact on SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PhotoStl0 -
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
URL Construction
Working on an old site that currently has category urls (that productively rank) like this example: LakeNameBoating.com/category/705687/rentals I want to enhance the existing mid page one rank for terms related to "Lake Name Boat Rentals," 301ing the old urls to the new, would you construct the new urls as: LakeNameBoating.com/lake-name-boat-rentals or... LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals And why? It's all for one particular lake with "name" being just an anonymous placeholder example. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page
If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea. However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect? e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Should I build links to the home page or a url containing the keyword?
I run an IT company and the company name does not contain the key word I am trying to rank on. I also have a bunch of pages with page rank that containing the actual keywords, for example: http://www.mycompanyname.com/tech-support/locations/brighton My target keyword is "Tech Support Brighton" My Home page is PR4 and my location based pages are PR3. My plan was to build 3 or 4 location pages for the locations we provide tech support for and target location based keyword Anchor text to these URL's e.g "Tech Support Brighton" and then for the home page build links that have the anchor text "Tech Support". Does this sound sane? Many Thanks, K
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0 -
Reciprocal link finder tool - not looking to do reciprocal links.
The company I work for had an old SEO company that did a lot of reciprocal links with websites that are not what we want to be associated with. Does anyone know of a tool that might be able to tell us if there are still reciprical links to our site? I want to try and find them, but the old pages we had with links going out have been deleted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b2bcfo0 -
Use rel=canonical to save otherwise squandered link juice?
Oftentimes my site has content which I'm not really interested in having included in search engine results. Examples might be a "view cart" or "checkout" page, or old products in the catalog that are no longer available in our system. In the past, I'd blocked those pages from being indexed by using robots.txt or nofollowed links. However, it seems like there is potential link juice that's being lost by removing these from search engine indexes. What if, instead of keeping these pages out of the index completely, I use to reference the home page (http://www.mydomain.com) of the business? That way, even if the pages I don't care about accumulate a few links around the Internet, I'll be capturing the link juice behind the scenes without impacting the customer experience as they browse our site. Is there any downside of doing this, or am I missing any potential reasons why this wouldn't work as expected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cadenzajon1