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.
How to handle dynamic product url that changes regularly
-
Hey Moz,
It's actually my first post - although I look at the Q&As on a daily basis!
I was hoping to get your opinions on how to handle dynamic product url that can change regularly.
Before we start, our product page urls get populated by the product titles.
So the situation is this.
- Let’s say we have a product url: /product/12345-abcde-fghj/
- Then the client decides to change the title a week later, so the url changes with it to): /listing/12345-klm-qjk
- Another week later, the agent changes to: /listing/12345-jkhfk-jhf-kjdhfkjdhf
So to note, the product ID will always remain the same.
Naturally, 301 redirecting every time would cause a bit of page authority to be lost every time 301ed. Also potentially creating new a few hundreds of 301 redirect daily sounds totally mental. (I have been informed by the dev we expect a few hundreds to change url daily) Although I understand there’s no limit on how many 301s you can have on a single domain, this would look completely unnatural - really not ideal.
So the potential solution we thought was:
we’ll keep the original url, and make sure that is the only url that will get indexed**/product/12345-abcde-fghj/**and put canonical tag on any of the new urls, directing to the original url. The problem we will have then is that the most current url may not exactly match the description of the product -wouldn’t be ideal for ux.
Has anyone had dealing with issues like this in the past? Would love to get your input!
Many Thanks
-
Thanks Everett! yes there's definitely seo benefit from having the title in the URL, and I think it's pretty significant - from what I have seen previously when we made a massive url changes for one of the websites I worked on - went from /{id}/ to {id}-{product-title}. Also there is a study shows that display url in search results is still a prominent element to influencing searchers' clicks. This is from 2012 but I think the same still applies today. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/155941/domainbias.pdf so I'd prefer to have the titles included.
It is completely possible to make the very original static, and that would be my preferred option - but we need to assess whether the changes were made because they were "mildly" or "totally" incorrect in the first place, and also at the same time need to convince others - who feel keeping the original urls (when the product titles change) would worsen ux.
301 redirects would be totally mental - so this would not be an option. Also adding canonical tag to the "non-original" urls method - potentially ok in the short term.
I think using static (hardcoded) urls would be the only long-term solution.
-
Hi Patrick that's really helpful thanks,
Completely understand it's confusing, I was totally surprised myself to find out there were so many changes to the title on a daily basis.
I would personally have one static url (original url) so this page can carry on build authority. I'm going to find out what these changes that are being made may be.I mean if it's just the title changing and nothing else, the chances are that the original product title (& url) will still stay relevant - it may be that our clients are trying to optimise their title, or spelling error etc. - I'm not sure at this point but that will be my next job to find out!
I can't link to the site, as it is being worked for relaunch currently. Site relaunches are always terrifying
-
Hi there
This is very confusing haha. What I would suggest is, if the product itself stays the same while new items or features are added to it (the only reason I can think why URLs are changing - correct?), to create one static URL / page for the product and update the description as the product updates. I would also add Schema into the template of the product so that it dynamically pulls information from the description and let's crawlers know of the changes. You'll have to talk to your web development team to make sure this is possible.
This way, you have one static URL per product, with only descriptions / features changing. This will cut down on multiple URLs, redirects, canonicals, and overall, confusion. I would also take a look at this resource from inFlow; this is on duplicate content for eCommerce which it sounds like you might potentially run into.
Let me know if a. that I am on the right thought pattern here and b. that this helps. You may want to link to your site so that the community can get a more indepth look! Hope this helps - good luck!
Patrick
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
-
SEO - New URL structure
Hi, Currently we have the following url structure for all pages, regardless of the hierarchy: domain.co.uk/page, such as domain/blog name. Can you, please confirm the following: 1. What is the benefit of organising the pages as a hierarchy, i.e. domain/features/feature-name or domain/industries/industry-name or domain/blog/blog name etc. 2. This will create too many 301s - what is Google's tolerance of redirects? Is it worth for us changing the url structure or would you only recommend to add breadcrumbs? Many thanks Katarina
Technical SEO | | Katarina-Borovska1 -
Truncated product names
Due to the restraints of category page layout many of the products in certain categories have the product titles truncated, in some cases missing off 2-5 words depending on the product in question. The product name which displays on the category page is lifted straight from the product page itself, so not possible to do something like "product name including spec..." to place ... to indicate a bit more. I'm assuming not but just wanted to check that Google will not frown on this. Text is not being hidden it just does not render fully in the restricted space. So there is a scenario of 'bits of' text in the source not displaying on the rendered page.
Technical SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
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
Technical SEO | | DutchG
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"0 -
Url folder structure
I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature _
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes.
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.0 -
Duplicate content on Product pages for different product variations.
I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | bobjohn10 -
How do I handle duplicate content of the same product in Multiple product categories?
I am building a BigCommerce store for selling framed art. Many of the pieces of art will fall in more than one product category. Let's say I have a framed print of a photograph of a western landscape. This piece of art would fit into these categories; "western", "landscape", and "photography". I would have three pages with duplicate content for just this one framed print. Will google give me less page rank due to this? Can all the link juice be given to just one of the three categories by use of rel=canonical? If so, does anyone know how to do this for a bigcommerce site? I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks, Kelly
Technical SEO | | Kelly_S0 -
My .htaccess has changed, what do i do to avoid it again...?
Hello Today i notice that our site did not auto changed from without www to with, when i checked the .htaccess file i notice # in-front of each line and i know we did not insert it in there, after i removed it it worked fine. The only changes that we did recently was to a mobile version to the site but the call to autodirect is in a JS and not in the .htaccess, could it be the server..? is there any way that anything else might cause this...? The site is HTML and WP could it be because of that...? Thank's Simo
Technical SEO | | Yonnir0 -
Is it worth setting up 301 redirects from old products to new products?
This year we are using a new supplier and they have provided us a product database of approx. 5k products. About 80% of these products were in our existing database but once we have installed the new database all the URLs will have changed. There is no quick way to match the old products with the new products so we would have to manually match all 5k products if we were were to setup 301 rules for the old products pointing to the new products. Of course this would take a lot of time. So the options are: 1. Is it worth putting in this effort to make the 301 rules? 2. Or are we okay just to delete the old product pages, let the SE see the 404 and just wait for it to index the new pages? 3. Or, as a compromise, should we 301 the old product page to the new category page as this is a lot quicker for us do do than redirecting to the new product page?
Technical SEO | | indigoclothing0