Ecommerce Link Juice and Canonical URLs
-
Hello all. I am optimising an E-Commerce site and I have a questions about Products in several categories & Canonical URL's. Using Magento Platform.
site.com/category1/product1/ ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/product1/ ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 ( link from category is the same , as is the canonical URL )
site.com/product1/ ( this is where other categories link to )Canonical links for all the above is site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 which takes care of duplicate content correctly.
I just wonder if we would get more link juice if ALL the links from all categories went to site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 ( instead of some going to site.com/product1/ )
Thanks in advance
-
Thank you for confirming my thoughts. In the meantime, that's exactly what we've implemented anyway
It didn't seem logical to me either - nice to have a sounding board over here.
-
Why would you canonically link Product pages to the category page? Of course that is going to disappear the product pages. Why not just link from the product pages to category pages with a normal link <a>to increase page authority on the category page?</a>
-
Hey Guys
I'm sure I stumbled across a Q&A about canonically linking product pages to appropriate category pages, the theory being that 25 product pages canonically linking to the relevant category page should increase the authority of the category page. By extension, that means that product pages never show up in SERPS, which I'm not quite so keen on.
I'll be damned if I can find the thread, even with a search engine
Any advice or tales of woe gratefully received.
-
I completely agree. 1 URL is by far the better choice.
-
I still think the better option is to have 1 URL. I was using the root URL for products ( effectively 1 URL ) and not having the category in the URL and my SEO was doing well - BUT I wanted the Categories to be displayed in Google as clickable - so I changed to the canonical method having different URLs with 1 Canonical. Over a couple of months my SEO suffered terribly - some categories in the top 10 down to 20-30 . I have just implemented having 1 URL ( with category in it ) - we will see how we go..
-
Hello Yusuf,
If you have a link to Jon Mueller saying that, instead of someone else saying he did, I would love to go check it out because the statement is in direct opposition to the one on Google's website here, which says:
"Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to
http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD
get consolidated with links tohttp://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html
."Notice is says "helps" though. As always, the directive is a "hint" to Google, which has the right to ignore the hint if they want to.
-
Thanks - yes I am actually seeing this first hand.
I used the canonical method - and it is rapidly degrading my SEO . not hugely , but some things that were almost on page 1 are now at the end of page 1 / beginning of page 2. I am currently changing everything to have 1 URL ( with the category this time )
-
Hi Everett,
Thanks for your response.
I also believed that the rel=canonical merge the link profiles but so far all the evidence I've seen suggests that it doesn't.
Firstly - Jon Mueller from Google stated that the rel=canonical tag doesn't merge the link profile. That's talked about here.
http://moz.com/community/q/quick-rel-canonical-link-juice-question
Secondly, if I look at some examples, you'd expect pages with rel=canonical tags to have zero authority etc. reported for page alternatives in Open Site Explorer.
e.g. on the ASOS website there is a link to the men's section which uses a query string parameter.
http://www.asos.com/men/?via=top
The canonical url is
Both report different levels of authority. If the link profiles were merged, would you not expect either the same levels of authority reported or the non-canonical version to report no authority?
I understand that Moz tools don't work like Google so I'd like to hear from someone who can explain this.
Thanks,
Yusuf
-
Yusuf,
I do believe rel canonical tags merge the link profile of all non-canonical URLs to the one canonical URL.
Also, relying on redirects in this case could be problematic for breadcrumbs.
-
Hello Marty,
If you have the opportunity to use only ONE URL, to which you will link from all categories - and which will be the one and only canonical for that product - I would use site.com/product/product1. Note the use of a /product/ directory instead of being off the root. I find that having products in a product directory makes diagnoses of issues (i.e. index count, site:domain.com inurl:product searches, Analytics segmentation...) a lot easier. However, if you want to keep it site.com/product1 then that would be fine as well. It would be preferable to using multiple URLs and relying on 301 redirects or rel canonicals, which are effective band-aids, but band-aids nevertheless. It is better to actually fix the problem, which is products living on multiple URLs.
Of course you're going to still want to either 301 redirect or rel canonical the old ones to your canonical version since the URLs are likely already in Google's system and possibly have external links.
And you should think about what happens to breadcrumbs as well. If a user gets to /product1 from one category vs another, will their breadcrumb change and how will that be done? Is it ok for usability for the breadcrumb on that product page to always reference the canonical category (i.e. Home ---> category 2 ---> category2 ---> product1)? I tend to think so, and this also may help your internal linking be more consistent when Googlebot visits the page.
-
Thanks for your replys
- I'm not really asking the question whether it should be a 301 or Canonical - I have the opportunity to make all the links go directly to the correct URL - or to go to the category and use Canonical. ( then there would ony be one actual URL ) - just wondering if that is more beneficial as you would have 4-5 links going to the same product page instead of 1 going to the product page and the rest with Canonical URL's .
So if you have any more ideas...???
-
The canonical is the right way of setting the website up. When we take on an E-commerce client that has products accessible via multiple URL's is to Google which one has the authority, so if you are looking at product X then google it and see which URL Google is giving the authority to, look at the path then canonical all other variations to that path.
-
Hi
I've often wondered about this - whether to use a 301 or leave pages as they are and use the rel=canonical tag.
I would think that a 301 from the duplicate to preferred page would be best. This would mean that any inbound links will pass juice to the preferred page (i.e. site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1). The rel=canonical tag, as far as I know, does not merge the link profile of the duplicate pages.
However, depending on the skill of your developers, other rewrite/redirect rules on your site and your CMS - the rel=canonical might be the only feasible method.
This page explains it very nicely.
http://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use
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
-
Pages canonicaled to another appearing before the canonical on google searches
Hello, When I do this google search, this page(amandine roses category) appears before the one it is canonical-ed to(this multi-product version of amandine roses). This happens often with this multi-product template, where they don't rank as well as their category version(that are canonical to the multi-product version). Can someone maybe point us in the right direction on what the issue may be? What can be improved?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalrose.com0 -
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
More bad links
Hi, After a recent disastrous dalliance with a rogue SEO company I disavowed quite a few domains (links he had gained) which I was receiving a penalty of about 23 places. I cleaned up the site and added meta descriptions where missing, and deleted duplicate titles and pages. This gained me another 5 places. In the meantime I have been getting a few links from wedding blogs, adobe forums and other relevant sites so was expecting an upward momentum. Since the high point of bottom of page 1 I have slowly slid back down to near the bottom of page two for my main keywords. Just checked my webmaster tools latest links and another 4 domains have appeared (gained by the dodgy SEO) : domain:erwinskee.blog.co.uk domain:grencholerz.blog.co.uk domain:valeriiees.blog.co.uk domain:gb.bizin.eu They all look bad so I am going to disavow. I expect to find an improvement when I disavow these new domains. As I have said, have started using the open site explorer tool to check my competitors backlinks and getting some low level links(I'm a wedding photographer) like forum comments and blog comments and good directories. I know there is much more than this to SEO and plan on raising my game as time progresses. I have also gained more links from the domains I disavowed on the 8th January mostly from www.friendfeed.com. will webmaster tools ignore any new links from previously disavowed domains? Like I have said I know there are better ways to get links, but are these links (forum comments, blog comments and respectable directories) one way of raising my rankings? To be honest that is all my competitors have got other than some of the top boys might have a photograph or two on another site with a link. No-one has a decent article or review anywhere (which is my next stage of getting links). Thanks! David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
I got message in my Google webmaster tool: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Does anyone knows the difference between "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" and "Unnatural links to your site" Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Capitals in URLs
Hello Mozzers. I've just been looking at a site with capitals in the URL - capitals are used in the product descriptions, so you'll have a URL structure like this: www.company.com/directory1/Double-Beds-Luxury (such URLs do not work if I lower the case of the capitals). There are 50,000 such products on the site. Clearly one drawback is potential customers might type in, or link to, the lower case of the URL and get a "not found" result (though the urls are relatively long so not that likely I'm thinking). Are there any additional drawbacks with the use of capitals outlined here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Should we use URL parameters or plain URL's=
Hi, Me and the development team are having a heated discussion about one of the more important thing in life, i.e. URL structures on our site. Let's say we are creating a AirBNB clone, and we want to be found when people search for apartments new york. As we have both have houses and apartments in all cities in the U.S it would make sense for our url to at least include these, so clone.com/Appartments/New-York but the user are also able to filter on price and size. This isn't really relevant for google, and we all agree on clone.com/Apartments/New-York should be canonical for all apartment/New York searches. But how should the url look like for people having a price for max 300$ and 100 sqft? clone.com/Apartments/New-York?price=30&size=100 or (We are using Node.js so no problem) clone.com/Apartments/New-York/Price/30/Size/100 The developers hate url parameters with a vengeance, and think the last version is the preferable one and most user readable, and says that as long we use canonical on everything to clone.com/Apartments/New-York it won't matter for god old google. I think the url parameters are the way to go for two reasons. One is that google might by themselves figure out that the price parameter doesn't matter (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en) and also it is possible in webmaster tools to actually tell google that you shouldn't worry about a parameter. We have agreed to disagree on this point, and let the wisdom of Moz decide what we ought to do. What do you all think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peekabo0 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
Disabling a website - What to do with "link juice"?
Hi I built a website for a client a long time ago now and for a number of reasons I have decided to shut down the website. None payment being one of the reasons! My question to all you SEO guru's out there is, what should I do with 301 redirects. The site is an e-commerce based website and my personal website is simply advertising my services and portfolio. If I 301 redirect all the traffic from the customer website, will there be any issue with Google (or any search engine) seeing that my website is receiving traffic for search phrases such as "Coffee Mugs"? I.e. abolutely no relevance at all to my website content! My worry is my site could be penalised for a flurry of thousands of redirected links. Also, if I redirect everything to my site and the customer decides to pay the bill in due course, I will then remove the redirects - I guess this will have a massive impact on the rankings of the site? Thanks for reading and any advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yousayjump0