Best URL Structure for Product Pages?
-
I am happy with my URLs and my ecommerce site ranks well over all, but I have a question about product URL's. Specifically when the products have multiple attributes such as "color".
I use a header URL in order to present the 'style' of products,
www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-LIST
and I allow each 'color' to have it's own URL so people can send or bookmark a specific item.
www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-ANCH1
www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-GIB-LPCCT-WRCH1
I use a rel canonical to show that the header URL is the URL search engines should be indexing and to avoid duplicate content issues from having the exact same info, MP3's, PDF's, Video's accessories, etc on each specific item URL. I also have a 'noindex no follow' on the specific item URL.
These header URLs rank well, but when using tools like SEOMoz, which I love, my header pages fail for using rel canonical and 'noindex no follow'
I've considered only having the header URL, but I like the idea of shoppers being able to get to the specific product URL.
Do I need the no index no follow? Do I even need the rel canonical? Any suggestions?
-
thanks again!
-
I'd just keep the general ROBOTS variant and drop the ID:
The id="" shouldn't hurt, but it may be messing with our crawlers (Google should be ok). The additional GOOGLEBOT directive is repetitive.
-
I'm looking at the id= reference. I have:
<meta id="ctl00_robots" name="ROBOTS" content="robots" /><meta id="ctl00_googlebot" name="GOOGLEBOT" content="googlebot" />
What would you change that to?
-
Thank you, I appreciate the time you spend to understand and answer my question!
-
I think that canonicalizing the colors/variations back up to the "root" product is a good bet - while those color variations are technically unique, they can look like thin content to Google, especially at a large scale. A couple of suggestions, though:
(1) I wouldn't use the canonical tag AND Meta Robots (noindex) - it could confuse the crawlers. In this case, since there are separate URLs for the colors/variations and people might link to those, I'd just keep the canonical and drop the Meta Robots.
(2) I think our crawler might be tripping up on the id="" reference in the Meta Robots tag, but I'm not 100% sure. That shouldn't be an issue for Google, although I try to keep those tags free of ids and other extra attributes.
(3) In general, you don't need a Meta Robots tag for all bots and Googlebot separately (especially if the behaviors are the same). I don't think it's a problem here, but it's not necessary.
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
-
Doubts about the technical URL structure
Hello, first we had this structure Categorie: https://www.stoneart-design.de/armaturen/ Subcategory: https://www.stoneart-design.de/armaturen/waschtischarmaturen/ Oft i see this https://www.xxxxxxxx.de/badewelt/badmoebel/ But i have heard it has something to do with layers so google can index it better, is that true ? "Badewelt" is an extra layer ? So i thought maybe we can better change this to: https://www.stoneart-design.de/badewelt/armaturen/ https://www.stoneart-design.de/badewelt/armaturen/waschtischarmaturen/ and after seeing that i thought we can do it also like this so the keyword is on the left, and make instead "badewelt" just a "c" and put it on the back https://www.stoneart-design.de/armaturen/c/ https://www.stoneart-design.de/armaturen/waschtischarmaturen/c/ I dont understand it anymomre which is the best one, to me its seems to be the last one The reason was about this: this looks to me keyword stuffing: Attached picture Google indexed not the same time the same url, so i thougt with this we can solve it Also we can use only the word "whirlpools" in de main category and the subs only the type without "whirlpools" in text thanks Regards, Marcel SC9vi60
Technical SEO | | HolgerL0 -
301 redirects - one overall redirect or an individual one for each page url
Hi I am working on a site that is to relaunch later on this year - is best practise for the old urls (of which there are thousands) to write a piece of code that will cover all of the urls and redirect them to the new home page or to individually redirect each url to its new counterpart on the new site. I am naturally concerned about user experience on this plus losing our Google love we currently have but am aware of the time it would take to do this individually. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Pday1 -
Product Level 301 Redirects Best Practice
When creating a 301 mapping file for product pages, what is best practice
Technical SEO | | Bucktown
for which version of the URL to redirect to? Base directory or one
subdirectory/category path. Example Old URL: www.example.com/clothing/pants/blue-pants-123 Which of the following should be the new target URL: www.example.com/apparel/pants/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/apparel/blue-apparel/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/apparel/collections/spring-collection/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/blue-pants-123 This is assuming the canonical tag will be www.example.com/blue-pants-123. Also, if www.example.com/blue-pants-123 cannot be reached via site
navigation would it be detrimental to make that the target URL if Google
cannot crawl that naturally? Thanks0 -
Getting Rid of Duplicate Page Titles After URL Structure Change
I've had all sorts of issues with google when they just dropped us on our head a few weeks ago. Google is crawling again after I made some changes, but they're still not ranking our content like they were so I have a few questions. I changed our url structure from /year/month/date/post-title to just /post-title and 301 redirected the old link structure to the new. When I look I see over 3000 duplicate title errors listing both versions of the url. 1. How do I get google to crawl the old url structure and recognize the 301 redirect and update the index? 2. Google is crawling the site again, but they're not ranking us like they were before. We're in a highly competitive category and I'm aware of that, but we've always been an authority in our niche. We have plenty of quality backlinks and often we're originators of the content which is then rewritten by a trillion websites everywhere. We're not the best at writing and titles, but we're working on it and this did not matter much to google previously as it was ranking us pretty highly on the front page and certainly ranking us over many sites that are ranking above us today. Some backlinks http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/dajaz1.com A few examples - if you google twista gucci louis prada you'll see many of the sites who trackbacked to us since we premiered the song rank much higher than us. 3 weeks ago we were ranking above them. http://dajaz1.com/twista-gucci-louis-prada/ google search jadakiss consignment mixtape 3 weeks ago we were ranking higher than all 4 sites ranking above us. The sites ranking above us even link to us or mention us, yet they rank above us now. original content here http://dajaz1.com/watch-jadakiss-confirms-cosignment-mixtape-2012-schedule/ I could throw out a ton of examples like this. How do we get google to rank us again. It should be noted that I'm not using any SEO plugin's on the site. I hand coded what's in there, and I know I can probably do it better so any tips or ideas is welcome. I'm pretty sure that our issues were caused by the Yoast SEO Plugin as when I search site:dajaz1.com the pages and topics that display were all indexed while the plugin was active. I've since removed it and all calls to it in the database, but I'm pretty nervous about plugins right now. Which brings me to my third and final question How do I get rid of the page category and topic pages that were indexed and seem to be ranking higher than the rest of our content? I lied one more. For category url I've set it to remove the category base so the url is dajaz1.com/news or dajaz1.com/music is that preferable or is this causing me issues? Any feedback is appreciated. Also google is crawling again (see attached image) but the Kilobytes downloaded per day hasn't. Should I be concerned about this? Gd9i6
Technical SEO | | malady0 -
Same page from different locations has slight different URL, is it a negative SEO practice?
Hi, Recently we made change in our website link generation logic, and now I can reach the same page from different pages with slightly different URLs like this: http://www.showme.com/sh/?h=wlZJNya&by=Featured_ShowMe and http://www.showme.com/sh/?h=wlZJNya&by=Topic Just wondering is this a bad practice and should we avoid it? Thank you, Karen
Technical SEO | | showme0 -
Page rank 2 for home page, 3 for service pages
Hey guys, I have noticed with one of our new sites, the home page is showing page rank two, whereas 2 of the internal service pages are showing as 3. I have checked with both open site explorer and yahoo back links and there are by far more links to the home page. All quality and relevant directory submissions and blog comments. The site is only 4 months old, I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the fact 2 of the lesser linked pages are showing higher PR? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nextman0 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860 -
Keywords Ranking Dropped from 1st Page to Above 5th Page
Hello, My site URL is http://bit.ly/161NeE and our site was ranked first page for over hundred keywords before March, 30. But all of a sudden, all the keywords on first page dropped to 5th or 6th page. When we search for our site name without ".com", the results appeared on first page are all from other sites. And our page can only be seen on 6th page. We think we have been penalized by Google. But we don't know the exact reason. Can anyone please help? Some extra info on our site: 1. We have been building links by posting blog, articles and PR. All the articles are unique, written by the writers we hire. It has been working fine all the time. We also varied the anchor text a lot. 2. We didn't make any change to the website. But one real problem with our site is that the server is very slow recently and when google crawl our website, many errors were found, mostly 503, 404 errors. And the total number of errors have reach to over 50,000. Do you think this might be a problem for Google not displaying us on first page? Our technicals are working hard to solve server problem. And if it is solved, shall our rankings be back? Please advise. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Milanoocom0