URL path randomly changing

[ennovators]

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:

1)www.domain.com/productx

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

[Dezzign]

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/

[ennovators]

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

[Dezzign]

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/productx

It'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.

[ennovators]

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,

[hectormainar]

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.