Advice urgently needed on best practice for handling multiple product categories on Magento website

[Coraltoes77]

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?

[LynnPatchett]

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!

[Coraltoes77]

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?

[LynnPatchett]

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.

[Coraltoes77]

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.

[LynnPatchett]

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!

[Coraltoes77]

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.

[LynnPatchett]

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.

[MarcOZ]

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.