Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
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 -
Best way to change URL for already ranking pages
Hello. I have a lot of pages that I'm optimising. The ones I'm focusing on right now is already ranking, but the URLs could be better (they don't include the keywords right now). However I'm worried that if I change the URLs they will drop in rankings or have to start over. I would of course set up 301 redirect, but is there more I need to do? What is the best way to change URL for already ranking pages?
Technical SEO | | GoMentor0 -
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 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
Ok to Put a Decimal in a URL?
I'm in the process of creating new product specific URLs for my company. Some of our products have decimals in them for their names as a unit of measurement. For example - .The URL for a 050" widget would be something like: http://www.example.com/product/category/.050-inch-widget My question is - Can I use a decimal in the URL without ticking off the search engines, and/or causing any other unexpected effects?
Technical SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
Urls with or without .html ending
Hello, Can anyone show me some authority info on wheher links are better with or without a .html ending? Thanks is advance
Technical SEO | | sesertin0 -
Changing DNS -- SEO implications?
Hey Moz, We're migrating an old site on an old server over to a new server/DNS. The plan is to keep the same URL structure and reuse our existing URL's. As long as we make minimal changes to each page's content, we should be able to update our DNS entry and get all the pages recreated and assigned to their correct URLs without any reduction in SEO rankings. Is this correct? This site gets a lot of organic traffic and ranks highly on some challenging keywords, so it's key that we retain our rankings as much as possible. I've read that it's wise to lower the DNS time-to-live to one hour, about a day before the move, to help Google crawl the DNS a little quicker. Are there any other recommendations you guys can offer or past experiences?
Technical SEO | | stephen_reply0 -
Use of + in url good or bad?
Hi, I am working on a SEO project for a client.
Technical SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
Some of the urls have a + between the keyword.
like www.example.com/make+me+happy/ Is this good or bad for seo?
Or is it maybe better to use - ? Thanks!0