URL path randomly changing
-
Hi eveyone,
got a quick question about URL structures:
I'm currently working in ecommerce with a site that has hundreds of products that can be accessed through different URL paths:
2)www.domain.com/category/productx
3)www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx
4)www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx
5)...
In order to get rid of dublicate content issues, the canoncial tag has been installed on all the pages required. The problem I'm witnessing now is the following:
If a visitor comes to the site and navigates to the product through example 2) at time the URL shown in the URL browser box is example 4), sometimes example 1) or whatever. So it is constantly changing.
Does anyone know, why this happens and if it has any impact on GA tracking or even on SEO peformance.
Any reply is much appreciated
Thanks you
-
If that was the final product page, then yes, you should be using a standard htacess rewrite command to ensure that the final product urls are always www.domain.com/productx But in saying that, the way you had it is totally fine if all the other url possibilities have a canonical tag that points back to optimised version (original product url - www.domain.com/productx)
The htacess rewrite it's not something you should be handling manually. Magento has that option inbuilt into it. It would be a fair amount of work if you had to do that manually. and I would just run with the canonical option if that were the case. Any good eCommerce platform should have the inbuilt ability to automatically remove the category folders and other search queries from the final product url.
Sometimes it's ok to leave the category folders in the url, it just depends on the products being sold. Below would be an example where I would leave the category folders in the url if I was selling different colored soccer balls.
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/black-white/
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/blue-white/
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/red-yellow/ -
Hi Richard,
thanks a lot for your reply.
Let me clarify: productx is a final product page (not a category page with a variety of products). This means that my productx page basically corresponds to your /final-product example.
According to your post and the htaccess command mention, I assume, that it does not cause problems, if the URL shown in the browser does not correspond to the one, the user actually took?
So no matter if a customer comes to the final product page through 1) 2) 3) 4). The URL shown could always be 1) and thats fine. Is that what you ment?
Thanks in advance
-
Those paths all seem fine as they are all legitimate ways of getting to that bunch of products. I'm also assuming that the final page on each of the below urls is a page that contains a selection of products and you can still click on an individual product from the list and go to its url.
1)www.domain.com/productx
2)www.domain.com/category/productx
3)www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx
4)www.domain.com/bestsellers/productxIt's even debatable whether you need canonical tags on any of those above urls, it all depends on how different those pages are from each other with regards to the content on the page before the products. If all of those above urls had different H1 tags and different content before the product feed then they are all stand alone legitimate pages that don't need canonical tags. But if they're all virtually the same and not much customization has been done to the auto generated pages then yes, they should all have a canonical tag back to www.domain.com/productx perhaps, or the most suitable page.
A bigger issue I think you may have is the url of the final single product page. It shouldn't be like this:
www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx/final-product/
or like this either:
www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx/final-product/Optimally, it should read like this no matter how the visitor got there:
www.domain.com/final-product/In most cases, for optimal Seo, an extension, plugin, or htaccess command should rewrite the final product url to strip out all of the category url paths or best seller url paths from the urls so your final product page url is short and clean like this: www.domain.com//final-product/ even though the path is really ths: www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx/final-product/
It's pretty hard to tell what the optimal solution for your site is without having a look at it and understanding your product range and categorization a bit better, but I hope that helps a bit.
-
Thanks for your reply Hector,
The way, the pages are structured on our site is the way 99% of ecommerce business have them structured so that is not the issue here. It's more the path itself that concerns me a bit.
Cheers,
-
It is a technical issue with your ecommerce platform. Definitely it is not good to have that kind of different URLs.
Canonicals are helpful with pages where you cannot do anything but having two similar pages on your site, or when there are almost identical pages. But when dealing with such an important page on an Internet project like the product page on a ecommerce site, you should definitely take action and manage to have unique URLs for every product, not depending of the path the visitor follows to reach that page.
It will become difficult to measure conversion rates or any other KPI on Analytics, and also will become a problem in SEO, with so many different pages to link.
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
-
Unsolved Orphaned unwanted urls from the cms
Hi
Technical SEO | | MattHopkins
I am working on quite an old cms, and there are bunch of urls that don't make any sense.
https://www.trentfurniture.co.uk/products/all-outdoor-furniture/all-outdoor-furniture/1
https://www.trentfurniture.co.uk/products/all-chairs/all-chairs/1
https://www.trentfurniture.co.uk/products/all-industries/all-chairs/1
https://www.trentfurniture.co.uk/products/all-chairs/all-industries/1
https://www.trentfurniture.co.uk/products/all-chairs/banqueting-furniture/1
https://www.trentfurniture.co.uk/products/all-chairs/bar-furniture/1
https://www.trentfurniture.co.uk/products/all-chairs/bentwood-furniture/1
For example there are no internal links. And fortunately not much traffic at all. But I can't see in the cms why they are generating? I've tried to check the html code to check why, what's the reason? But all I can think of is the structure....? something odd the cms writes?
Anyone have any ideas please? And would I redirect all these? Just thinking there could be a better solution/fix, rather than redirects since there are no links or traffic.....Like the devs solve why they are generating.....Unfortunately I get very slow responses from the devs as a 3rd pty company, hence on here ;0). (Some of those are indexed too)... :0) Thanks in advance....0 -
Does the URL structure matter?
I have a blog on entertainment. does the url structure matter to rank my blog and iam also facing the issue of indexing of my blog. visit and check this if i need further changes.
Technical SEO | | Hammad784540 -
Same URL for languages sub-directories
Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages, example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
I have multiple URLs that redirect to the same website. Is this an issue?
I have multiple URLs that all lead to the same website. Years ago they were purchased and were sitting dormant. Currently they are 301 redirects and each of the URLs feed to different areas of my website. Should I be worried about losing authority? And if so, is there a better way to do this?
Technical SEO | | undrdog990 -
Changing URLs for SEO
Hi, Currently we have a page, /business, but we have shifted our strategy to optimize for this page for the keyword "enterprise" instead of "business". The page authority of this page is 18 and our domain authority is 35. I've already updated content and title tags to more of an enterprise focus. Would it be wise to move the page to /enterprise and create a 301 redirect from /business to /enterprise? Or is this too risky from an SEO standpoint? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mikekeeper0 -
Negative url name?
I have a new client who has the letters "BB" at the start of his url name, bbzautorepair.com. He was told by someone at Google Adwords that the letters "BB" in his url name could hurt him with Google rankings. Reason being that Google red flags anything or website to do with firearms, guns and ammunition. He was told that the letters "BB" could be mistaken or red flagged for "BB Gun". Seems a bit far fetched. Has anyone every heard of such a thing? Thanks
Technical SEO | | fun52dig
Gary Downey0 -
Magento URL Question
Calling all Magento Kings out there! I'm working on a client' site - powered by magento. I'm looking to rewrite a lot of the URLs. I know there is the URL rewrite tool, but I think what I need to do may go beyond this. Typical example would be: Old URL - http://www.xxxxxxxx.co.uk/fabric/product/product-black-screen-print-and-silver-fabric.html New URL - http://www.xxxxxx.co.uk/fabric/product/silver I know that magento's URLs seem to be created through categories so wanted to double check with someone the best way to do this. Also, I've heard that 301 redirects of non www to www in the .htaccess has a knock on effect on discounts? All comments greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | PerchDigital0 -
When URL rewrite can lead to un pretty URLs
Hi Mozzers. I've a client that has done a little bit of mess rewriting the URLs of its site. In fact, also the data base driven URLs are rewritten, but the dev forgot to change the space with "-", so that now the 95% of the URLs are like this one: http://www.portalesardegna.com/search/Appartamenti e Residence/ Obviously not really a pretty URL. I am not so sure if this issue has an SEO consecuences (in fact, the site ranks pretty well also with those kind of url), but I am thinking more on usability issue. Could you suggest me any easy fix to this rewrite problem?
Technical SEO | | gfiorelli12