Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Canonical tag use for ecommerce product page detail

    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.

    Canonical tag use for ecommerce product page detail

    Technical SEO
    3
    6
    3254
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • amastone
      amastone last edited by

      Hi,

      I have a category page I want to rank. This page has 24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same.
      I want to use canonical tag in any product to the parent category. 
      Is this a right use of the canonical? 
      Category page I'm talking about is : Finger bits

      If I understand how to use canonical tags I can improve all my category pages.

      thanks

      marco

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • davissmith122
        davissmith122 last edited by

        Hii,

        The canonical tag plays a vital role in optimizing eCommerce product page details, helping to prevent duplicate content issues and enhance SEO performance.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • amastone
          amastone last edited by

          Ok, thank you. now it's clear and it makes sense 🙂

          take care
          marco

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • LoganRay
            LoganRay @amastone last edited by

            Even though your product titles have lower search volume, you still want to use your product detail pages as the preferred ranking URL for any product-specific query. This is where the benefit of long-tail keywords comes into play, you'll get a lot less traffic from them, but the quality (likelihood of them converting/purchasing) is much higher.

            Take the 'Nicolai – 8th Wonder finger bit – Granite' for example. If I've done a Google search for that, my research is already done and I know exactly what I need. If I click on a result that takes me to a category page, that's not going to be as useful to me. But if the search result is for the product detail page, I'm landing on the exact page I want. It's got all the product info & specs I need, pricing, and most importantly, an Add to Cart button.

            Hope that's helpful. For more info on ecomm SEO, I'd recommend taking a look at back through some of the Moz posts on the subject: https://moz.com/blog/category/e-commerce

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • amastone
              amastone @LoganRay last edited by

              Hi Logan,

              thank you for your answer.
              I will follow your suggestion.

              But this is is really something I'm interesting in deeply understand.
              If I have a category with many products
              category1 with products' titles: cat1 p1, cat1 p2, cat1p3, cat1 p4,cat1 p5, cat1 p6..
              category2 with products' titles: cat2 q1,cat2 q2,cat2 q3,cat2 q4,cat2 q5,cat2 q6,cat2 q7,cat2 q8,cat2 q9

              I know that 90% of searches are for the "category keywords" because specific product title is so specific that has low volume search.

              I want to avoid that these product pages are all of low authority because rank for the same long term keyword that is exactly the category. With a big effort I can write different descriptions but they will rank anyway all the the big hat keyword as well. isn't it.

              I think this is one of the most common SEO issue for e-shops.

              Any resources where I can learn more?
              ciao

              LoganRay 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • LoganRay
                LoganRay last edited by

                Marco,

                Do not proceed with that task, it is not the proper way to use a canonical tag. If you put a canonical tag pointing a product to a category page, the product URL will eventually get removed from the index and therefore won't drive any traffic for product-specific queries.

                You mentioned "24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same", is Moz flagging them as duplicates? If so, I'd recommend differentiating these products more. You could write more robust descriptions or add user-generated content such as reviews or Q&A.

                amastone 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • BakeryTech

                  Unsolved Using NoIndex Tag instead of 410 Gone Code on Discontinued products?

                  ecommerce noindex shopify indexed urls

                  Hello everyone, I am very new to SEO and I wanted to get some input & second opinions on a workaround I am planning to implement on our Shopify store. Any suggestions, thoughts, or insight you have are welcome & appreciated! For those who aren't aware, Shopify as a platform doesn't allow us to send a 410 Gone Code/Error under any circumstance. When you delete or archive a product/page, it becomes unavailable on the storefront. Unfortunately, the only thing Shopify natively allows me to do is set up a 301 redirect. So when we are forced to discontinue a product, customers currently get a 404 error when trying to go to that old URL. My planned workaround is to automatically detect when a product has been discontinued and add the NoIndex meta tag to the product page. The product page will stay up but be unavailable for purchase. I am also adjusting the LD+JSON to list the products availability as Discontinued instead of InStock/OutOfStock.
                  Then I let the page sit for a few months so that crawlers have a chance to recrawl and remove the page from their indexes. I think that is how that works?
                  Once 3 or 6 months have passed, I plan on archiving the product followed by setting up a 301 redirect pointing to our internal search results page. The redirect will send the to search with a query aimed towards similar products. That should prevent people with open tabs, bookmarks and direct links to that page from receiving a 404 error. I do have Google Search Console setup and integrated with our site, but manually telling google to remove a page obviously only impacts their index. Will this work the way I think it will?
                  Will search engines remove the page from their indexes if I add the NoIndex meta tag after they have already been index?
                  Is there a better way I should implement this? P.S. For those wondering why I am not disallowing the page URL to the Robots.txt, Shopify won't allow me to call collection or product data from within the template that assembles the Robots.txt. So I can't automatically add product URLs to the list.

                  Technical SEO | | BakeryTech
                  0
                • kguard

                  What is the correct Canonical tag on m.site?

                  We have 2 separate sites for desktop (www.example.com) and mobile (m.example.com) As per the guideline, we have added Rel=alternate tag on www.example.com to point to mobile URL(m.example.com) and Rel=canonical tag on m.example.com to point to Desktop site(www.example.com).However, i didn't find any guideline on what canonical tag we should add ifFor Desktop sitewww.example.com/PageA - has a canonical tag to www.example.com/PageBOn this page, we have a Rel=alternate tag m.example.com/pageAWhat will be the canonical we should add for the mobile version of Page Am.example.com/PageA - Canonical tag point to www.example.com/PageA -or www.example.com/PageB?Kalpesh

                  Technical SEO | | kguard
                  0
                • Jon-S

                  Product Variations (rel=canonical or 301) & Duplicate Product Descriptions

                  Hi All, Hoping for a bit of advice here please, I’ve been tasked with building an e-commerce store and all is going well so far. We decided to use Wordpress with Woocommerce as our shop plugin. I’ve been testing the CSV import option for uploading all our products and I’m a little concerned on two fronts: - Product Variations Duplicate content within the product descriptions **Product Variations: - ** We are selling furniture that has multiple variations (see list below) and as a result it creates c.50 product variations all with their own URL’s. Facing = Left, Right Leg style = Round, Straight, Queen Ann Leg colour = Black, White, Brown, Wood Matching cushion = Yes, No So my question is should I 301 re-direct the variation URL’s to the main product URL as from a user perspective they aren't used (we don't have images for each variation that would trigger the URL change, simply drop down options for the user to select the variation options) or should I add the rel canonical tag to each variation pointing back to the main product URL. **Duplicate Content: - ** We will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product.  Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique. The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc. I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO. My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content?  If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed. Many thanks in advance for any advice.

                  Technical SEO | | Jon-S
                  0
                • DutchG

                  Removed Product page on our website, what to do

                  We just removed an entire product category on our website, (product pages still exist, but will be removed soon as well) Should we be setting up re-directs, or can we simply delete this category and product 
                  pages and do nothing? We just received this in Google Webmasters tools: Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. We have not updated the sitemap yet...Would this be enough to do or should we do more? You can view our website here: http://tinyurl.com/6la8 We removed the entire "Spring Planted Category"

                  Technical SEO | | DutchG
                  0
                • Istoresinc

                  Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?

                  Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx The title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237 Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top? I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this. I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO. NIck

                  Technical SEO | | Istoresinc
                  0
                • franchisesolutions

                  What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?

                  I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!

                  Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions
                  1
                • sidstar

                  The Mysterious Case of Pagination, Canonical Tags

                  Hey guys, My head explodes when I think of this problem. So I will leave it to you guys to find a solution... My root domain (xxx.com) runs on WordPress platform. I use Yoast SEO plugin. The next page of root domain -- page/2/ -- has been canonicalized to the same page -- page/2/ points to page/2/ for example. The page/2/ and remaining pages also have this rel tags: I have also added "noindex,follow" to page/2/ and further -- Yoast does this automatically. Note: Yoast plugin also adds canonical to page/2/...page/3/ automatically. Same is the case with category pages and tag pages. Oh, and the author pages too -- they all have self-canonicalization, rel prev & rel next tags, and have been "noindex, followed." Problem: Am I doing this the way it should be done? I asked a Google Webmaster employee on rel next and prev tags, and this is what she said: "We do not recommend noindexing later pages, nor rel="canonical"izing everything to the first page." (My bad, last year I was canonicalizing pages to first page). One of the popular blog, a competitor, uses none of these tags. Yet they rank higher. Others following this format have been hit with every kind of Google algorithm I could think of. I want to leave it to Google to decide what's better, but then again, Yoast SEO plugin rules my blog -- okay, let's say I am a bad coder. Any help, suggestions, and thoughts are highly appreciated. 🙂 Update 1: Paginated pages -- including category pages and tag pages -- have unique snippets; no full-length posts. Thought I'd make that clear.

                  Technical SEO | | sidstar
                  0
                • tjhossy

                  Do canonical tags pass all of the link juice onto the URL they point to?

                  I have an ecommerce website where the category pages have various sorting and paging options which add a suffix to the URLs. My site is setup so the root category URL, domain.com/category-name, has a canonical tag pointing to domain.com/category-name/page1/price however all links, both interner & external, point to the former (i.e. domain.com/category-name). I would like to know whether all of the link juice is being passed onto the canonical tag URL? Otherwise should I change the canonical tag to point the other way? Thanks!

                  Technical SEO | | tjhossy
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.