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
-
Quickview product modal - should I add rel=canonical to each URL ?
I have a quick view modal for all products on my website. How should I deal with these in the page set up eg. should I rel=canonical to the full product page and no-index in robots txt or are they ok in Googles eyes as they are part of the UX ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan0 -
Url structure on product pages - Should we apply canonicalized links in breadcrumbs or entry folders
We have products in the that go into mulitiple categories on our e-commerce site. But of course, each product is only canonicalized to one category. My question is: what should the breadcrumbs look like when users access a product from a non-canonicalized/primary category ?Should we apply canonicalized links in breadcrumbs or entry folders? For example: Let´s say we have product called "glacier hiking in the alps". It is in two categories; 1) glacier hiking 2) mountain tours. And is canonicalized to the glacier hiking category. If a user accesses it from the mountain tours category, should the url/breadcrumbs look like this: www.example.com/glacier-hiking/glacier-hiking-in-the-alps (because that is the canonicalized version) Or should it look like like this: www.example.com/mountain-tours/glacier-hiking-in-the-alps (because that is where the user came from) Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidetoiceland0 -
A/B Testing - Should I add product descriptions on my category landing pages as well as on product pages and if so . how to do this to avoid duplicate content
Hi All, I recently relaunched a new design on my tool hire eCommerce website and now display my products in grid form on my category landing pages as opposed to just a list view which we previously had on the old design. My bounce rates are alot higher than they use to be and my gut instinct is telling me maybe this is wrong . I want to do some a/b testing using a list view. My question is , previously in our list views we just showed the images and pricing and had on page content on the bottom of the page. The user would click on the product image and they would then we taken to the product page which has the product description , t&c, etc etc.. If I was to do this in my a/b testing but change it so we also displayed the product descriptions as well on the category landing pages . Is there a special way to do this as in effect, we would have duplicate content as the product descriptions are also on the product page?. Does anyone have any thoughts on this as to whether its a No No from an SEO point of view ?... Heres a short url link to one of my category pages - http://goo.gl/QJv5gw Historically we use to rank well for the category landing pages and not for the product pages.Our Rankings are down , bounce rates are higher so I am trying to sort both. We have good content on pages etc. Any advice greatly appreciated as always thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
404's - Do they impact search ranking/how do we get rid of them?
Hi, We recently ran the Moz website crawl report and saw a number of 404 pages from our site come back. These were returned as "high priority" issues to fix. My question is, how do 404's impact search ranking? From what Google support tells me, 404's are "normal" and not a big deal to fix, but if they are "high priority" shouldn't we be doing something to remove them? Also, if I do want to remove the pages, how would I go about doing so? Is it enough to go into Webmaster tools and list it as a link no to crawl anymore or do we need to do work from the website development side as well? Here are a couple of examples that came back..these are articles that were previously posted but we decided to close out: http://loyalty360.org/loyalty-management/september-2011/let-me-guessyour-loyalty-program-isnt-working http://loyalty360.org/resources/article/mark-johnson-speaks-at-motivation-show Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carlystemmer0 -
Is Content Location Determined by Source Code or Visual Location in Search Engine's Mind?
I have a page with 2 scroll features. First 1/3 of the page (from left) has thumb pictures (not original content) and a vertical scroll next to. Remaining 2/3 of the page has a lot of unique content and a vertical scroll next to it. Question: Visually on a computer, the unique content is right next to the thumbs, but in the source code the original content shows after these thumbs. Does that mean search engines will see this content as "below the fold" and actually, placing this content below the thumbs (requiring a lot of scrolling to get to the original content) would in a search engine's mind be the exact same location of the content, as the source code shows the same location? I am trying to understand if search engines base their analysis on source code or also visual location of content? thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How to properly link to products from category pages?
Hi All, We have an e-commerce website and the category pages are built so that there is a product image and below it there is the title. Both the image and the title are in a href (each on its own). I encountered the following unfinished discussion here at MOZ:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-optimize-achor-text-links-on-ecommerce-category-page#post-93758 The discussion states that its improper. The question is - if it is wrong then why? (maybe because Google will give its weight to the image anchor instead of the text anchor since it is higher in the page). The other question is how to resolve the matter?
Should I add nofollow to the image href? Thanks0 -
What's going on with my organic traffic from Google?
I am working on eCommerce website Vista Stores. My website's traffic is going down due to certain reason. I have done R & D and have assumption with auto generated content which I have added on few product pages. You can find out attachment to know more about current situation of traffic. 6789134845_d1a1578960_b.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
What's the best way to phase in a complete site redesign?
Our client is in the planning stages of a site redesign that includes moving platforms. The new site will be rolled out in different phases throughout a period of a year. They are planning to put the new site redesign on a subdomain (i.e. www2.website.com) during the roll out of the different phases while eventually switching the new site back over to the www domain once all the phases are complete. We’re afraid that having the new site on the www2 domain will hurt SEO. For example, if their first phase is rolling out a new system to customize a product design and this new design system is hosted on www2.website.com/customize, when a customer picks a product to customize they’ll be linked to www2.website.com/customize instead of the original www.website.com/customize. The old website will start to get phased out as more and more of the new website is completed and users will be directed to www2. Once the entire redesign is completed, the old platform can be removed and the new website moved back to the www subdomian. Is there a better way of rolling out a website redesign in phases and not have it hosted on a different subdomain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueAcorn0
