Volusion eCommerce Site 302s and Canonicalization
-
There have been a couple other threads concerning this topic so I apologize, but I have an iteration on the main question that has not been answered.
Crawl Diagnostics is giving me a bunch of 302 temporary redirect notices. For example, here is a page title URL:
http://store.in-situ.com/Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/0073380.htmand here is the redirect:
http://store.in-situ.com/Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/tape-clt-meter.htm?1=1&CartID=0The first link is actually a child product of:
http://store.in-situ.com//Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/tape-clt-meter.htmVolusion tech support told me they believe most of them are meta redirects but could not find any documentation on them. All the other threads concerning this have said to either change the 302s to 301s, which I don't think is possible, or to add a nofollow tag.
My question is do I need to do anything if both those pages are canonical to the parent product? Should I be passing on the linkjuice if neither of those pages are of high value?
-
This is correct.
-
Thank you for the details Nathan. I will contact Volusion directly. But to summarize for any other users happening upon this thread:
The answer to your question is that no, we are not planing to change all of our URLs at once. This will be an ongoing need, perhaps maybe 10 URLs per month on a continuing basis. The scenario is that in the past, when we made an engineering change to our products, we did not generally issue a new product code in Volusion. But for tracking, warranty, and UL listing purposes, going forward, we need to begin issuing new product codes when engineering changes occur. So, when we make a form/fit/function change to a product 12345-A, we will need to create a new product 12345-B.
The solution of canonical relationship links is not applicable here, because we are not just talking about SEO. Any visitor who arrives on 12345-A need to be taken to 12345-B. The canonical will help the search engines avoid duplicate indexing, but it is just as important for us to manage the visits of real users (who may arrive from links other than those in search engine results). So, we need a redirect. Volusion does provide a method for this (http://support.volusion.com/article/using-redirects-products-volusion), but this method issues a 302 redirect which is not desirable for SEO purposes.
And Volusion also provides a method for administering 301 redirects, but only when the requested page does not exist.
So, in the reply from Nathan above, he is recommending to physically delete the old product from the database so that the original page does not exist, and set up redirects using the Volusion application, after the deletion has been done.
There are some details to be considered when taking this approach, so we are going to contact Volusion directly to work through those. But I wanted to summarize here to help others who may have a similar need. Nathan, if I've incorrectly summarized, please add-on. Thanks.
-
Hi drewk,
Are you wanting to supplant your existing URLs with new URLs? If this is the case the Volusion 301 manager will work for you:
1. Back up your product's database
2. Map your legacy URLs to your new equivalent. Might want to save a copy in Drive or Excel. Since you are creating new URLs, make sure they are both search and user friendly.
3. Add in your 301's and remove your legacy pages. I STRONGLY suggest testing this on a few low priority pages first before confidently rolling it out across the site. The 301 manager will only return the 301 response if the legacy page is removed. A hidden product is still an active page.
4. Submit the new URLs from your test to the search engines; i.e. Google Fetch via Google Webmaster Tools and make sure Google recognizes the 301 redirects and has indexed your new URLs. This may take a couple days.
5. Assuming this process goes smoothly for you, roll it out across your website. Depending on how large your website is, you might want to do this slowly to minimize any temporary loss in rankings and traffic.
Basically, this is definitely a delicate process and we don't usually recommend merchants to change product codes holistically. I'd recommend working with our SEO services team if you are hesitant about executing this: http://www.volusion.com/ecommerce-seo-services
If you do want to keep legacy URLs and create new URLs with new product codes, you can add the new URLs as canonicals on the legacy pages. There is no guarantee Google or the other search engines will respect this directive, but they should. This is a safer route, but you'll have many more pages to manage and there is no guarantee the search engines will rank your new URLs over the legacy. Again, please contact our services team to go over all your options.
Regards,
Nathan
-
Nathan,
We have a very similar question, and would like your opinion. We are also a Volusion customer, and in the near future will need to create new revisions of many of our existing product codes. For tracking reasons, we wish to create a new product code. Because Volusion can only perform a redirect when the original requested page does not exist, we were planning to use this procedure here: http://support.volusion.com/article/using-redirects-products-volusion.
However, when we tested this procedure, which seems to apply to our scenario, the Volusion application issues a 302 redirect instead of a 301 redirect. And I'm very hesitant to use this because 302 redirects evidently pass 0% link juice (https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection).
Nakul above wrote that possibly a combination of the 302 redirect PLUS a canonical might be the solution. However, I'm not yet sure if the canonical tag on the child product would be followed if the page has already redirected (via 302) to the parent page.
Do you have any insight you can share on this, specific to how Volusion recommends to handle this scenario?
-
It's always good to see vendors helping out on here. Thanks Nathan!
-
Hi Taylor, Nakul is correct. Please let me know if I can provide any further assistance.
Regards,
Nathan
-
Taylor, you are 100% on the right track. All the answers exist in your question.
#1. These are "redirect notices", not errors. More like warnings.
#2. As long as they are canonicalized correctly, which you said "do I need to do anything if both those pages are canonical to the parent product".There's absolutely nothing you need to do. You are good. It's always good and important to verify these technical SEO issues. I hope this helps.
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
-
Site Not Being Indexed
Hey Everyone - I have a site that is being treated strangely by google (at least strange to me) The site has 24 pages in the sitemap - submitted to WMT'S over 30 days ago I've manually triggered google to crawl the homepage and all connecting links as well and submitted a couple individually. Google has been parked the indexing at 14 of the 24 pages. None of the unindexed URL's have Noindex or follow tags on them - they are clearly and easily linked to from other places on the site. The site is a brand new domain, has no manual penalty history and in my research has no reason to be considered spammy. 100% unique handwritten content I cannot figure out why google isn't indexing these pages. Has anyone encountered this before? Know any solutions? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | CRO_first0 -
How to stop crawls for product review pages? Volusion site
Hi guys, I have a new Volusion website. the template we are using has its own product review page for EVERY product i sell (1500+) When a customer purchases a product a week later they receive a link back to review the product. This link sends them to my site, but its own individual page strictly for reviewing the product. (As oppose to a page like amazon, where you review the product on the same page as the actual listing.) **This is creating countless "duplicate content" and missing "title" errors. What is the most effective way to block a bot from crawling all these pages? Via robots txt.? a meta tag? ** Here's the catch, i do not have access to every individual review page, so i think it will need to be blocked by a robot txt file? What code will i need to implement? i need to do this on my admin side for the site? Do i also have to do something on the Google analytics side to tell google about the crawl block? Note: the individual URLs for these pages end with: *****.com/ReviewNew.asp?ProductCode=458VB Can i create a block for all url's that end with /ReviewNew.asp etc. etc.? Thanks! Pardon my ignorance. Learning slowly, loving MOZ community 😃 1354bdae458d2cfe44e0a705c4ec38dd
Technical SEO | | Jerrion0 -
No follow links from ban sites
Hello boys and girls. I'm auditing my link profile and came across links pointing to my sites, from a ban site (site: domain.com gives back no result).yet the links are no follow. should i try to remove them all? i know no follow should be enough, yet my links are set in a bad neighborhood. what would you recommend??
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
Matt Cutts says 404 unavailable products on the 'average' ecommerce site.
If you're an ecommerce site owner, will you be changing how you deal with unavailable products as a result of the recent video from Matt Cutts? Will you be moving over to a 404 instead of leaving the pages live still? For us, as more products were becoming unavailable, I had started to worry about the impact of this on the website (bad user experience, Panda issues from bounce rates, etc.). But, having spoken to other website owners, some say it's better to leave the unavailable product pages there as this offers more value (it ranks well so attracts traffic, links to those pages, it allows you to get the product back up quickly if it unexpectedly becomes available, etc.). I guess there's many solutions, for example, using ItemAvailability schema, that might be better than a 404 (custom or not). But then, if it's showing as unavailable on the SERPS, will anyone bother clicking on it anyway...? Would be interested in your thoughts.
Technical SEO | | Coraltoes770 -
Two sites
Hi there just joined had nightmere of a time trying to get a website up and running..... now i have 2 .... one marketing person did and one i did the one i did performing better on google but other onre looks more profetional is there a way i can conbine the 2 under one site..... the one that looks better and getting the benifit of the one thats performing better...... Thanks steve......
Technical SEO | | stevetemple0 -
Internal file extension canonicalization
Ok no doubt this is straightforward, however seem to be finding to hard to find a simple answer; our websites' internal pages have the extension .html. Trying to the navigate to that internal url without the .html extension results in a 404. The question is; should a 401 be used to direct to the extension-less url to future proof? and should internal links direct to the extension-less url for the same reason? Hopefully that makes sense and apologies for what I believe is a straightforward answer;
Technical SEO | | jg1000 -
What keywords should i be using to promote my site
Hi i am looking to promote my home page which is a lifestyle magazine www.in2town.co.uk and i am not sure what keywords i should be using to promote it. I am doing ok for the keyword lifestyle magazine but i am struggling on what other keywords i should be using to get people to the home page of the magazine. The magazine is nearly finished and we still have a couple of finishing touches to do but the basics of the magazine is as follows holiday and travel news, soap gossip, celebrity gossip, product reviews, lingerie brands, gastric band hypnotherapy, health, fashion and beauty and holiday reviews. I want the home page to be the main page where everyone visits but i am not sure what i should be doing to accomplish this. Any ideas would be of a great help
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Will 301 redirecting a site multiple times still preserve the original site value?
Hi, All! If site www.abc.com was already 301 redirected to site www.def.com, and now the site owner wants to redirect www.def.com to www.ghi.com - is there any concern that it's not going to work, and some of the original linkjuice, rank, trust, etc. is going to vanish? Or as long as the 301s are set up right, should you be able to 301 indefinitely? Does anyone have any experience with actually doing this and seeing good/bad/neutral results? Thanks in advance! -Aviva B
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0