Problem: Magento prioritises product URL's without categories?
-
HI there, we are moving a website from Shoptrader to Magento, which has 45.000 indexations.
yes shoptrader made a bit of a mess. Trying to clean it up now.- there is a 301 redirect list of all old URL's pointing to the new
- one product can exist in multiple categories
- want to solve this with canonical url’s for instance:
- shoptrader.nl/categorieA/product has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product
- shoptrader.nl/categorieA/product-5531 has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product
- shoptrader.nl/categorieA/product¤cy=GBP has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product
- shoptrader.nl/categorieB/product has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieB/product, has canonical tag towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product
- shoptrader.nl/categorieB/product?language=nl has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieB/product, has canonical tag towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product
Her comes the problem:
New developer insists on using /productname as canonical instead of /category/category/productname, since Magento says so.The idea is now to redirect to /category/category/productname and there will be a canonical URL on these pages pointing to /productname, loosing some link juice twice. So in the end indexation will take place on /productname … if Google picks it up the 301 + canonical. Would be more adviseable to direct straight to /productname (http://moz.com/community/q/is-link-juice-passed-through-a-301-and-a-canonical-tag), but I prefer to point to one URL with categories attached. Which has more advantages(?):
- clear menustructure
- able to use subfolders in mobile searchresults
- missing breadcrumb
What would you say?
-
Not to muddy up the conversation too much, but I wouldn't try to keep the category paths in product URLs as the canonical. What happens when you have one product in multiple categories? I would make .com/products/product-name as the canonical URL in the rel canonical tag. What you choose to show in the URL bar for the purpose of user experience and breadcrumb consistency is a different story. I hope I am understanding your situation correctly.
-
Sure no problem. That is what I would do ín that case. The best theoretical thing is to redirect all URLs to the best matching page and use /category/subcategory/page and make sure that DC is not an issue. However, with Magento, I have seen many issues with redirects going bad, and my strategy is now more time focused
-
Hi,
The magento extension mentioned in the stackoverflow link above might do what you need. If you have thousands of products it can get time consuming planning and setting it all up and then keeping an eye on them all to make sure the canonicals are working as expected - thats what I meant by might not be worth the effort. If you are ready to put in the initial work then no reason not to give that extension a try and see if it does what you need (I don't think that extension was around the last time I set up a magento shop!).
-
To your opinion, could this be a solution to keep the categories in URL's ... as canonicals?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14476579/seo-category-and-product-path-url-magentowhat do you mean, might not be worth the effort? will it take something like one work week to accomplish this?
-
HI Lynn, thx for your time and effort to reply and share your professional knowledge as well.
and especially thx for the extra bit of knowledge ... did not know you could really influence that "If you have some super products with loads of external links to a /category/product page then that page might well appear in the serps anyway regardless of the canonical" ... knowing that canonical is a suggestion
-
Thx René! so glad with your professional point of view! Glad to know we are working in the correct direction. pfoeh.
-
HI,
If the 301s are mainly to redirect the old site to the new then I would redirect to/category/category/productname.
Since individual product pages rarely pick up a lot of external links (your case might be an exception) then you are not really losing any 'link juice' anyway. If you have some super products with loads of external links to a /category/product page then that page might well appear in the serps anyway regardless of the canonical (canonical is a suggestion not a hard rule).
There are ways to fiddle with the magento setup to allow for more customization of the canonical url for any given product and/or to 'create' breadcrumbs for /product pages but it will need a fair amount of custom coding and might not be worth the effort.
If it all gets to be too much - I would go with the /category/category/product 301s and then canonical to /product and be done with it. My two cents!
-
Most often the problem with Magento is DC and the recommendation is to use /category/subcategory/ for breadcrumbs and normal navigation and then use /product for the actual product page.
I agree that common UX dictates that it should more like, /category/subcategory/product, but Magento (and other e-commerce CMS) have issues with making more than one URL for a product.
I would stick to /product and make the necessary 301 redirects.
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
-
Facets Being Indexed - What's the Impact?
Hi Our facets are from what I can see crawled by search engines, I think they use javascript - see here http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers I want to get this fixed for SEO with an ajax solution - I'm not sure how big this job is for developers, but they will want to know the positive impact this could have & whether it's worth doing. Does anyone have any opinions on this? I haven't encountered this before so any help is welcome 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Trailing Slashes for Magento CMS pages - 2 URLS - Duplicate content
Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL. I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root. Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]0 -
Schema for Product Categories
We have an E commerce site and we have started to implement Schema's. I've looked around quite a bit but could not find any schema's for product categories. Would there be any schema's to add besides an image, description, & occasional PDF?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Why is /home used in this company's home URL?
Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Ecommerce URL's
I'm a bit divided about the URL structure for ecommerce sites. I'm using Magento and I have Canonical URLs plugin installed. My question is about the URL structure and length. 1st Way: If I set up Product to have categories in the URL it will appear like this mysite.com/category/subcategory/product/ - and while the product can be in multiple places , the Canonical URL can be either short or long. The advantage of having this URL is that it shows all the categories in the breadcrumbs ( and a whole lot more links over the site ) . The disadvantage is the URL Length 2nd Way: Setting up the product to have no category in the URL URL will be mysite.com/product/ Advantage: short URL. disadvantage - doesn't show the categories in the breadcrumbs if you link direct. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear1 -
Duplicate Title - Magento Products / Kunena Forum - Nofollow vs. Follow
Hello Mozzers! This is my first post so hopefully I can explain this in a way that is clear! I just signed up for my PRO membership and wanted to finally start hacking away at this companies site that I work for. I ran my report and noticed my Crawl Diagnostics: 715 Dupliate Page Titles I noticed that a lot those were coming from the customer login in magento. So I added the: User-agent: *Disallow:/customer/ as mentioned in this link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10742052/duplicate-content-issues-for-login-page Any suggestions on that? Also, We have a Kunena forum on our site and have noticed all of the nofollow links. People say I should change them to follow links, but other people say leave them or I will get penalized. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NRMWEBWORKS0 -
No matter what I do, my website isn't showing up in search results. What's happening?
I've checked for meta-robots, all SEO tags are fixed, reindexed with google-- basically everything and it's not showing up. According to SEOMoz all looks fine, I am making a few fixes, but nothing terribly major. It's a new website, and i know it takes a while, but there is no movement here in a month. Any insights here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wabash0 -
What is the best canonical url to use for a product page?
I just helped a client redesign and launch a new website for their organic skin care company (www.hylunia.com). The site is built in Magento which by default creates MANY urls for each product. Which of these two do you think would be the best to use as the canonical version? http://www.hylunia.com/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielmoss
or http://www.hylunia.com/products/face-care/facial-moisturizers/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution ? I'm leaning on the latter, because it makes sense to me to have the breadcrumbs match the url string, and also it seems having more keywords in the url would help. However, it's obviously a very long url, and there might be some benefits to using the shorter version that I'm not aware of. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts. Best, Daniel0