Canonicals for product pages - confused, anyone help?
-
I have an ecommerce website (built using Magento), and have just had the functionality extended to allow me to define my own canonical URLs. Currently the URLs are www. domainname.com/product-name.html but I can now change this to www.domainname. com/product-category/product-name.html. I was led to believe that this would be good for SEO.
However, I have since had conflicting advice - it's been suggested that any links across the website that link to domain/category/sub-category/product will pass weight and authority through to the specified canonical anyway. Plus longer URLs are generally worse...
I'm confused. Is it worth changing them? If so, would it be a bad thing to change all 700 canonical URLs at once?
-
I agree with Lynn, but I'm a little confused about the intent. If you create the new URLs with product categories in them, you'll need to move the old URLs somehow, such as with 301-redirects. The new canonical tags won't help those old URLs, so you're potentially creating even more duplicate content by creating a new canonical version.
Generally, I don't think adding categories to the URLs is a great idea. You can squeeze in a few more keywords, but the impact of that in 2013 is very small. As you said, you're also making the URLs longer and you're pushing back the unique keywords. So, Google is going to see more repetition toward the beginning of the URL and less unique information (as are users, although most people don't read URLs closely, IMO).
-
Hi,
If the only reason for changing the canonicals now is to try to help your SEO then I would not jump in and change all 700 right away. Canonicals are used to indicate the preferred version of a page for google to index, they do not actually remove duplicate content pages (see Dr Pete's detailed explanation here). Magento's default canonical structure is usually set to have product urls with no category in them to avoid the dup content issue which you get when the product is in multiple cats/sub cats at the same time. If this is not an issue for you and all products are only in one category, or you are happy for them to be indexed in a specific category then you could change the canonicals, but I would not think it would make a huge difference in rankings so would look at it more from a user's point of view. Does having the category in the url for any specific product make sense or help to define the product more? If yes then consider changing the canonical, but I would try it on a small subset of products first and monitor things for a while before changing them all.
Hope it helps!
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
-
What to do with sold product pages when everything you sell are unique one off items
Hi there, This is something i have been unsure of for years. It's a little different to most ecom website situations. What would you do with product pages when every product is a "one off" unique product and once sold will never be for sale again? Should i redirect to a category page? 404? Leave it as is marked as sold or say it is sold and show links to similar items? At the moment we have 700 products for sale but over 5000 sold products that have their own product page and my concern is as this grows it could become a lot for a WordPress woocommerce site to handle? I don't want to do anything to slow my site down or unnecessarily bloat it but i want to do the right thing by the visitor and also not do anything to hurt my rankings. These pages often rank in google and may have been there for years before the item actually sells. To throw another curve ball, there may be multiple other products (for sale or already sold) with the exact same name but are unique and different from each other. These products pages will often be 98% the same content as each other too. To explain how this could be the case, we sell artworks from many different artists, Every artwork is an original and is unique. But many artists paint the same subject matter multiple times, albeit in a slightly different way from previous times. So you end up with a unique product that has everything the same as another (same artist, same name of artwork, same size, same description, different image, different sku) but is actually different and unique. This has left me somewhat uncertain of what is best to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scottlinklater0 -
Please help us undertsand the things we need to improve so that google crawler visit us more often to reindex pages from our domain
we are currently in the process of a massive project which involves us migrating our domain, we realised that Google crawlwer has not been crawling our pages Quiet often. i have observed some cases where google crawled these pages about 6 months back and then never visited the pages again
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bhaskaran
and we had to manually submit these pages for reindexing in some geographies. can you please help us undertsand the things we need to improve so that google crawler visit us more often to reindex pages from our domain0 -
Pages canonicaled to another appearing before the canonical on google searches
Hello, When I do this google search, this page(amandine roses category) appears before the one it is canonical-ed to(this multi-product version of amandine roses). This happens often with this multi-product template, where they don't rank as well as their category version(that are canonical to the multi-product version). Can someone maybe point us in the right direction on what the issue may be? What can be improved?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalrose.com0 -
Mass uploading low quality product pages
Hi Mozzers! I have a question on mass uploading low quality product pages We have a huge catalogue of products and our product managers are looking to mass reference 17,000 new products quickly on the website. Obviously, this will mean content will somehow have to be made unique - which would take a huge amount of resource. Apart from this issue, will adding this many new product pages in one go be bad for SEO? If we also do manage to make the content unique, but not high quality - we'll have 17,000 new low quality product pages - will this reduce our domain authority? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
HELP! How do I get Google to value one page over another (older) page that is ranking?
So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers. I'll use widgets as an example: 1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years) 2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months) The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting). Solutions? "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it? Remove "for sale" from sitemap. Help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
301'd an important, ranking page to the wrong new page, any recourse?
Our 1,300 page site conversion from static html to Wordpress platform went flawlessly with the exception of 1 significant issue....an old, important, highly ranking page was 301 redirected to the wrong corresponding new page. The page it was redirected to is about a similar product, but not the same. This was an oversight that slipped through. It was brought to my attention when I noticed this new page was still holding the old page's rankings but the bounce rate skyrocketed (clearly because the content on the wrong new page was not relevant). Once identified, we cleaned up the redirect. My fear is that all the juice built up on the old .html page that ranked well has now permanently been passed to an irrelevant, insignificant page. -Is there any way to clean up this mistake? -Is there anything I can do to assist Google in associating the correct 'new' page with correct 'old' page after the wrong redirect was initially set-up? -Am I going to have to start from scratch with the new page in terms of trust, backlinks, etc. since google already noted the redirect? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen0 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Landing Page - Home Page redesign SEO factor question - Serious concern.
Hi Folks, I'm considering making a big change to our website and really need some expert advise. Will we lose ranking if we do what I propose? Our site www.meninkilts.com, needs to split users/clients by "Commercial" and "Residential" so we can message/market completely differently to each client. We are considering doing this structure: Landing Page | | Commercial Homepage Residential Homepage Right now we rank well, for our keywords like "Window Cleaning cityname" but are worried that adding a landing page, and splitting our site to two homepages will effect seo (ie: a landing page would only have two buttons: one for commercial and one for residential). What would be the best way to handle this. Looking forward to your insights! Cheers Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MenInKilts0