Advice urgently needed on best practice for handling multiple product categories on Magento website
-
I have an ecommerce site built using Magento and urgently need advice on best practice for handling multiple product categories (where products appear in more than one category on the site creating multiple URLs to the same page).
In April this year, based on advice from my SEO who felt that duplicate content issues were causing my rankings to be held back, I changed about 25% of the product categories to 'noindex, follow'. This has made organic traffic fall (obviously) as these pages fell out of Google's index. But, contrary to what I was hoping for, it didn't then improve rankings - not one iota, nothing - which was the ONLY reason why I did this. This has had a real negative impact on sales, so I'm starting to think this was actually an a terrible idea.
Should I change them back?
And to ask a wider question, what is best practice for this particular scenario?
-
Hi,
If there already is a canonical link then you can edit it using the layout update code I first mentioned. If you do not need to canonical to another page you can just leave it as it is (self referencing).
As to if you want to do it or not, this really depends on how big of a problem it is for your search efforts and how many cats/products you will need to manually adjust. I would think that if you keep track of them in an excel and remember to check when you are updating that with a couple of hundred categories/products (of which only maybe a couple dozen or less might have to be manually edited?) then you should be able to manage it ok.
Good luck!
-
Thanks, I have regenerated the xml sitemap. Fingers crossed it doesn't take too long to see the pages fall back into the index!
As it happens, my developer has since emailed back to say that there is a canonical link for each category but it points to itself. Is that a problem?? He can't tell me.
Thinking about it, I'm unsure about manually adding a canonical link for each product/category. I'm concerned about errors creeping in over time, with URL changes, etc. With hundreds of products, I think it won't be too difficult for this to happen. Plus, the XML is automatically generated, so don't think the URLs will match. Have you had encountered these problems before?
-
HI,
For the canonicals if they are not being added automatically at the category level then you can still do it just removing the first part of the above that removes the old url, so like this:
<reference name="head"><action method="addLinkRel"><rel>canonical</rel>
<href>http://www.domain.com/canonicalUrl</href></action></reference>The above will add a canonical tag to whichever category page you add it to (in the layout update box).
The fetch as google does not reindex your site, it just previews how google sees the site. Make sure all the category pages are included in your sitemap and resubmit the sitemap to GWT. You can then see how many pages in the sitemap are indexed and that number should go up as google recrawls the site and finds the noindex tag removed.
-
Thanks for taking the trouble to answer. I have now made all categories 'index, follow'.
No canonicals are automatically added to category pages, so can't use this technique. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
Should I 'Fetch as Google' in WMT? If so, is it best to add the URL for every single category that I've updated? Or, just wait?
Appreciate your help, Lynn.
-
Hi,
I would do it all at once, nothing unusual about it and google may not see the change on all pages at the same time anyway.
For the rankings it is really impossible to say, you might get lucky, you might have to be patient, its not exactly like starting over again, especially if you have a couple of existing external links but....
For the canonical tags, there is a way to do it depending on your setup. Have you got canonicals being automatically added to the category pages as well as the product pages? If yes then you can overwrite them on a case by case basis by putting the following code in the 'custom layout update' box (this works for both products and categories actually).
<reference name="head"><action method="removeItem"><type>link_rel</type>
<name>http://www.domain.com/oldurl</name></action></reference><action method="addLinkRel"><rel>canonical</rel>
<href>http://www.domain.com/new-url</href></action>You will need to identify the canonical url being inputted into the code, add it to the oldurl bit above to remove it and then put in the new canonical url you want. Needless to say, it pays to be sure about what you are trying to achieve and why before implementing this setup on a lot of pages.
Hope it helps!
-
The website uses Magento version 1.4. which actually does have the canonical link back to the base URL feature. This was in place already before I started even messing around with making these changes.
I will revert the categories back to 'index, follow'. Some questions about this:
- Is it best to do it all at once (or will this look odd/'unnatural' somehow from Google's perspective)
- How long will it take for these pages to re-rank? They were made noindex in April, so would it be like starting again as if these were totally brand new pages?
Another SEO has recommended another approach, which is to identify the 'best' URL (from SEO point of view) and add the canonical link to the rest. Is there a way to implement/manage this easily in Magento? I can't seem to find a solution online on this.
-
That Yoast plugin is only developed up to Magento version 1.4 which is pretty old now. The good news is you can get some of this functionality out of the box now at Admin -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Search engine optimizations. If you set the use canonical meta tag link on products to yes then all product pages are given a canonical link back to a base url with no category in it. Baring a more advanced paid module or custom development, this is going to be your best bet.
Certainly change your category pages back to index, follow. Depending on your setup and how many common categories/products you have any duplicate content issue you have would usually be on a product more than a category level anyway. For category pages look at getting some good descriptions and other unique content on them. Check out this video for more details.
-
Change them all back to INDEX, FOLLOW and use Canonical plugin by yoast.
Canonical URL's for Magento • Yoast (sorry if links not allowed)
Some products on our site appear in six categories and we have no issues with duplicate content whatsoever using the above.
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
-
Multiple CMS on one website / domain & SEO
For a client we would like to work with a content hub, but their website is build on a custom CMS so we are limited in our options and if we aks their web developers they ask crazy prices to help us. So now we have the idea to build the content hub with wordpress and implement it next to their current CMS. for example on www.website.com/contenthub/ . As far as i know this is technically possible and there are no negative effects regarding SEO as long as we link the two sitemaps together. Am i right or am i missing something here?
Technical SEO | | Siphoplait0 -
Images on Website for SEO
Good Morning, We have a magento website with hundreds of different products that have slight size variations. The image for each of these products looks the same (the only difference between the products is some of the dimensions) .... Would you recommend using the same image for each of these products and just use a generic file name that describes the overall product or would you give each product its own image with it's specific product name as the file name? Should I use 1 image for 500 different sku's or should i rename the file the name of each individual sku and load an individual image? The end user will not know the difference since all of the images will appear identical, simply asking from an SEO perspective. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Google not indexing my website
Hi guys, We have this website http://www.m-health-expo.nl/ but it is not indexed by google. In webmaster tools google says that it can not fetch the site due to the robots.txt but i do not see any faults in it. http://www.m-health-expo.nl/robots.txt Do you see something strange, it really bothers me.
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Website Down
Hello guys, My website hasn't been reachable for couple of hours today and I can't really understand why as no links have been built, all the best practices have been followed regarding on page optimization. I also checked google webmaster tools and there are no warning messages, crawl problems or anything so I don't understand why this has happened. Now for some reason the website is up and running again.
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar1 -
Is it best to create multiple xml sitemaps for different sections of a site?
I have a client with a very big site that includes a blog, videos, photo gallery, etc. Is it best to create a separate xml file for each of these sections? It seems to me like that would be the best way to keep everything organized. Or at least separate the blog out from the main site. Does anybody have any tips or recommendations? I'm not finding any good information about this.
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
New website
Hello, How bad is going to be if I change my Joomla website to Wordpress? I can check the 100 best pages and redirect them to the new url with 301 but my website has 424 pages. If is this needs time, how long does it take to be in the same position? Is Google review my new website quickly? What about if I make my services more specific and the main topic is going to be smaller in pages? (Mpre social services pages vs. less pages about the main webdesign topic) I should change my website to WP but I am afraid because now I am in the 2. 🙂 Thanks! Regards,
Technical SEO | | Netkreativ
Misi0 -
Best practices for migrating an html sitemap? Or just get rid of it all together?
We are migrating a very large site to a new CMS and I'm trying to determine the best way to handle all the links (~15k) in our html sitemap. The developers don't see the purpose of using an html sitemap anymore and I have yet to come up with a good reason why we should migrate rather than just get rid of the sitemap since it is not very useful to users. The html sitemap was created about 6 years ago when page rank sculpting was a high priority. Currently, since we already have an XML sitemap, I'm not sure that there's really a need for a html sitemap, other than to maintain all the internal links. How valuable are the internal links found in an html sitemap? And will it be a problem if we remove these from our link profile? 15,000 links sounds significant, but they only account for less than .5% of our internal links. What do all you think?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Mobile SEO Tips and Best Practices
Hi, Any advice on approaches for mobile SEO much appreciated. For example, what things do I need to do to optimise a mobile version of a desktop site? E.g. optimise titles, meta description, headings and copy, do I need to submit a mobile sitemap to Google? Do I need to link from the mobile page to the corresponding page on the desktop site and vice versa? Will Googlebot Mobile naturally find the site from the desktop link? What about link building for mobile sites, any thoughts on this, are there specific mobile sites that will link such as directories for a start? Any other tips or resources? Any SEOMoz resources on this? What about the same domain versus the subdomain debate about hosting the mobile site? Any thoughts? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | MarkChambers0