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.
ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?
-
We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site.
Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category.
This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product.
So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content?
Is this the best way?
-
Site is still in testing but as an example the products are for cars and the same product can fit multiple cars, hence why it may be in more than one place
-
Short answer: using rel="canonical" to point to the default URL for each product will solve the product-related duplicate content issue.
As for the "best" way to solve this problem, I actually prefer using a robots meta tag with "noindex, follow" attributes on each duplicate product page.
Since the duplicate URLs only exist for navigational purposes, I'd prefer to keep them out of the search engine indexes altogether.
Once you have this issue squared away, be sure to read through these resources for other important eCommerce considerations:
-
Another option i thought of would be that the other pages I simply add a no index meta tag to so it only indexes the one url.
The reason I say this as from experience of how seomoz crawls sites and some pages which i know are not duplicate content yet i have had many pages for many sites get tagged for duplicate content simply because there isn't enough of a difference on the page.
The product pages wouldb e very much the same as really all that would be different is the breadcrumb trail and possibly some other links 95% of the pages would be the same as they are the same product.
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
-
Looking for an SEO consultant: The Moz Community Is The Only Place I Trust
Moz Community, The most talented people that are SEO experts are part of this community, so that is why I came here to find assistance. I am a Partner at https://3forty3.com/, we are an executive search firm based in San Francisco. At 3FORTY3, we work with the top VC firms in Silicon Valley serving venture-backed and growth-stage clients. We placed marketing executives at 8 of the top 25 Forbes Cloud 100 companies. We are looking for an SEO consultant to help us with our website. Our phase 1 budget = $5K - $10K, but that would grow after phase 1. If interested, please email me directly at jon@3forty3.com. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eTownKid
Jon Schepke
Partner, 3FORTY3 Executive Search
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonschepke/0 -
SEO on Jobs sites: how to deal with expired listings with "Google for Jobs" around
Dear community, When dealing with expired job offers on jobs sites from a SEO perspective, most practitioners recommend to implement 301 redirects to category pages in order to keep the positive ranking signals of incoming links. Is it necessary to rethink this recommendation with "Google for Jobs" is around? Google's recommendations on how to handle expired job postings does not include 301 redirects. "To remove a job posting that is no longer available: Remove the job posting from your sitemap. Do one of the following: Note: Do NOT just add a message to the page indicating that the job has expired without also doing one of the following actions to remove the job posting from your sitemap. Remove the JobPosting markup from the page. Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 status code). Add a noindex meta tag to the page." Will implementing 301 redirects the chances to appear in "Google for Jobs"? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grnjbs07175 -
CDN for SEO (or not)?
Does CDN impact on SEO or not? There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course. Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc? Do you have any direct experience? All constructive input much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Ecommerce: A product in multiple categories with a canonical to create a ‘cluster’ in one primary category Vs. a single listing at root level with dynamic breadcrumb.
OK – bear with me on this… I am working on some pretty large ecommerce websites (50,000 + products) where it is appropriate for some individual products to be placed within multiple categories / sub-categories. For example, a Red Polo T-shirt could be placed within: Men’s > T-shirts >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
Men’s > T-shirts > Red T-shirts
Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts
Men’s > Sale > T-shirts
Etc. We’re getting great organic results for our general T-shirt page (for example) by clustering creative content within its structure – Top 10 tips on wearing a t-shirt (obviously not, but you get the idea). My instinct tells me to replicate this with products too. So, of all the location mentioned above, make sure all polo shirts (no matter what colour) have a canonical set within Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts. The presumption is that this will help build the authority of the Polo T-shirts page – this obviously presumes “Polo Shirts” get more search volume than “Red T-shirts”. My presumption why this is the best option is because it is very difficult to manage, particularly with a large inventory. And, from experience, taking the time and being meticulous when it comes to SEO is the only way to achieve success. From an administration point of view, it is a lot easier to have all product URLs at the root level and develop a dynamic breadcrumb trail – so all roads can lead to that one instance of the product. There's No need for canonicals; no need for ecommerce managers to remember which primary category to assign product types to; keeping everything at root level also means there no reason to worry about redirects if product move from sub-category to sub-category etc. What do you think is the best approach? Do 1000s of canonicals and redirect look ‘messy’ to a search engine overtime? Any thoughts and insights greatly received.0 -
Membership/subscriber (/customer) only content and SEO best practice
Hello Mozzers, I was wondering whether there's any best practice guidance out there re: how to deal with membership/subscriber (existing customer) only content on a website, from an SEO perspective - what is best practice? A few SEOs have told me to make some of the content visible to Google, for SEO purposes, yet I'm really not sure whether this is acceptable / manipulative, and I don't want to upset Google (or users for that matter!) Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Best Practice For Company/Client Logo Endorsement
Article: http://searchengineland.com/homepage-sliders-are-bad-for-seo-usability-163496 I came across the following article and somewhat agree with the authors summary.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
I find sliders a distraction to B2B users and overall offers no SEO benefits. Scenario
As a service provider, over time I have worked with many high profile blue chip comnpanies. As part of my site redesign, I'm looking to show users my client achievements. My initial thoughts are to carry out the following: On the home page I'm looking to incorporate some high profile company logos (similar to http://www.semrush.com) with a hyperlink "more customers" to the right of logo caption. The link will take the user to a dedicated page (www.mydomain.co.uk/customer) showing a comprehensive list of company logos. Questions
#1 Is the above practice good or bad.
#2 Is there a better way to achieve the above Any other practical advise on user experience, social engagement, website speed, etc would be much appreciated. Thanks Mark0 -
Using WP All Import csv import plugin for wordpress to daily update products on large ecommerce site. Category naming and other issues.
We have just got an automated solution working to upload about 4000 products daily to our site. We get a CSV file from the wholesalers server each day and the way they have named products and categories is not ideal. Although most of the products remain the same (don't need to be over written) Some will go out of stock or prices may change etc. Problem is we have no control over the csv file so we need to keep the catagories they have given us. Might be able to create new catgories and have products listed under multiple categories? If anyone has used wp all import or has knoledge in this area please let me know. I have plenty more questions but this should start the ball rolling! Thanks in advance mozzers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weebro0 -
SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen1