Canonical Tag for Ecommerce Site
-
My client has an ecommerce site with over 1,000 products. We have a ton of duplicates because of how their ecommerce system handles product pages.
Each time a new product is added, there is a default product page created (/product/12345-product-name.aspx).
Each time that product is added to a specific product category, another, separate URL is created (/product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx).
The site has over 1,000 duplicates (at least one for each product) because of how the ecommerce system structures URLs. We are unable to have unique content on /products/12345-product-name.aspx and /product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx because both pages pull from the same database.
Their webteam informed me that they can't implement canonical tags on individual pages, they must be dynamically added to the site all at once. Thus forcing me to choose all of the default product pages as primary URLs.
Both types of URLs are getting indexed and the product URLs that were added to the categories are SEO friendly so I'm leary to eliminate one or the other with a canonical tag or a no index.
Suggestions?
-
It is a custom built ecommerce site in asp.net.
-
What is the e-commerce solution your client is using?
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
-
Should you do on-page optimization for a page with rel=canonical tag?
If you ad a rel=canonical tag to a page, should you still optimize that page? I'm talking meta description, page title, etc.
On-Page Optimization | | marynau0 -
Why Does This Site Rank Well?
I noticed recently that the website of a local church (http://www.lifepointfc.com/) has climbed toward the top of the SERPS, and I cannot figure out why. The on-site SEO seems mediocre, at best, and their domain authority is 15 while their homepage authority is just 19. Does anyone see how they are working their SEO magic?
On-Page Optimization | | cbizzle0 -
Help! A site has copied my blog!
My site tanked on July 21 and I have been working so hard to bring it back up but nothing is working. Today I looked at "Links to Your Site" on Google Webmasters and I see a copy of my site on another URL. mysite.eemovies.org/mycategory/mypost The domain name is eemovies.org and then all my stuff is wrapped around it and all my content is there! How do I stop this?!
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
Prevent Indexing of URLs Based on Tags
I started my website as a blog over at Posterous, but decided to turn it into a full scale business website with a self-hosted WordPress theme. Shortly after transitioning from Posterous to WordPress, I noticed that Google was indexing not only my old blog posts, but the URLs of my blog posts based on the tags they have. Is there any reason why this is a problem? I'm sure it shouldn't qualify as duplicate content, but for some reason it just feels a bit sloppy to me to have all of these pages indexed...Is this a non-issue? Should I just be more discriminating with my use of 'tags' if it bothers me? JiGLH.png
On-Page Optimization | | williammarlow0 -
Hierarchy and consistency in ecommerce URLs
One of the first things I remember reading about SEO and URLs, a long time ago, is that keywords are important, and hierarchy is important, for search engines and for users. Hierarchy in URLs would give the search engines an idea of the structure of the site, and users would be able to edit the URLs to continue navigating. I'm wondering about URLs, hierarchy and usability lately, since I've seen that ASOS uses a new URL structure on their site. At first glance, I thought it was brilliant, so I would like to get all of your opinions as well. For those of you that haven't seen the URLs: for categories, ASOS uses a structure as you would expect it, but for products they don't insert the category in the URL. Instead they insert the brand name as the first part of the URL, followed by the product title. Some examples: Category:
On-Page Optimization | | DocdataCommerce
www.asos.com/women/dresses/... Product:
www.asos.com/french-connection/french-connection-tie-waist-pocket-stripe-dress/... I can see the importance of brand name for a site like ASOS, and like how they stressed this by inserting not the category but the brand for products. I don't know how much ASOS still relies on organic non-ASOS related keyword traffic, but still. Now, for hierarchy, I guess a good internal linking structure will tell the search engines about the hierarchy of a site as well, right? So perhaps hierarchy in the URL isn't that important? Perhaps something like this would be just as good as anything, given a good internal link structure? www.onlinestore.com/category/
www.onlinestore.com/subcategory/
www.onlinestore.com/brand/product-title/ Now, I understand that if you use this structure, you wouldn't be able to have men/shirts and women/shirts, but let's say that you don't have subcategories that use the same names. In this case, how important is hierarchy? And, what do you think about this URL structure for an ecommerce site for which brands are important?0 -
Canalogical Tag
Hello, I wanted to have a clean url for example : site.com/producta and our web developer installed this module which does this great. However there are now two products one with unclean url for example sit.com/productaxmlayoiadkja and the clean one - on both pages page it says: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.site.com/producta">Is this correct? Reason being is I'm aiming for the long tail and the site is not getting any visitor although we have unqiue 250 products+ and getting less then 20 visitors a day after almost a year! I would appreciate any help because I'm getting in real trouble because the site is performing so badly!
On-Page Optimization | | reallyitsme0 -
Alt tagging photos.
Here is the background. My wife has a website selling childrens clothing. All the basics of this webshop is through a company that have some 300 other sites. 2-4 times a year arond 100 products have to be added to the shop. Pictures are of course highly important. Some pictures are supplied by producer of clothes some we have to take ourself. Pictures supplied by producer is not tagged. When we are adding a product; avail sizes,prices, product description, which folder it is to be shown in etc is added. Pictures are added but there is no functionality for adding alt tag to the pictures. Is there any way i can incorporate the tag into the picture file eg .jpg before its added here or is it impossible is this impossible ? Thanks for all help. Dan
On-Page Optimization | | danlae0