Ecommerce Link Juice and Canonical URLs

[s_EOgi_Bear]

Hello all.  I am optimising an E-Commerce site and I have a questions about Products in several categories & Canonical URL's.  Using Magento Platform.

site.com/category1/product1/     ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/product1/     ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1  ( link from category is the same , as is the canonical URL )
site.com/product1/  ( this is where other categories link to )

Canonical links for all the above is site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1  which takes care of duplicate content correctly.

I just wonder if we would get more link juice if ALL the links from all categories went to site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1  ( instead of some going to site.com/product1/ )

Thanks in advance

[Mark-Tillison]

Thank you for confirming my thoughts. In the meantime, that's exactly what we've implemented anyway

It didn't seem logical to me either - nice to have a sounding board over here.

[s_EOgi_Bear]

Why would you canonically link Product pages to the category page?  Of course that is going to disappear the product pages.  Why not just link from the product pages to category pages with a normal link <a>to increase page authority on the category page?</a>

[Mark-Tillison]

Hey Guys

I'm sure I stumbled across a Q&A about canonically linking product pages to appropriate category pages, the theory being that 25 product pages canonically linking to the relevant category page should increase the authority of the category page. By extension, that means that product pages never show up in SERPS, which I'm not quite so keen on.

I'll be damned if I can find the thread, even with a search engine

Any advice or tales of woe gratefully received.

[Everett]

I completely agree. 1 URL is by far the better choice.

[s_EOgi_Bear]

I still think the better option is to have 1 URL.  I was using the root URL for products ( effectively 1 URL ) and not having the category in the URL and my SEO was doing well - BUT I wanted the Categories to be displayed in Google as clickable - so I changed to the canonical method having different URLs with 1 Canonical. Over a couple of months my SEO suffered terribly - some categories in the top 10 down to 20-30 . I have just implemented having 1 URL ( with category in it ) - we will see how we go..

[Everett]

Hello Yusuf,

If you have a link to Jon Mueller saying that, instead of someone else saying he did, I would love to go check it out because the statement is in direct opposition to the one on Google's website here, which says:

"Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD get consolidated with links to http://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html."

Notice is says "helps" though. As always, the directive is a "hint" to Google, which has the right to ignore the hint if they want to.

[s_EOgi_Bear]

Thanks - yes I am actually seeing this first hand.

I used the canonical method - and it is rapidly degrading my SEO . not hugely , but some things that were almost on page 1 are now at the end of page 1 / beginning of page 2.  I am currently changing everything to have 1 URL ( with the category this time )

[TranslateMediaLtd]

Hi Everett,

Thanks for your response.

I also believed that the rel=canonical merge the link profiles but so far all the evidence I've seen suggests that it doesn't.

Firstly - Jon Mueller from Google stated that the rel=canonical tag doesn't merge the link profile. That's talked about here.

http://moz.com/community/q/quick-rel-canonical-link-juice-question

Secondly, if I look at some examples, you'd expect pages with rel=canonical tags to have zero authority etc. reported for page alternatives in Open Site Explorer.

e.g. on the ASOS website there is a link to the men's section which uses a query string parameter.

http://www.asos.com/men/?via=top

The canonical url is

http://www.asos.com/men/

Both report different levels of authority. If the link profiles were merged, would you not expect either the same levels of authority reported or the non-canonical version to report no authority?

I understand that Moz tools don't work like Google so I'd like to hear from someone who can explain this.

Thanks,

Yusuf

[Everett]

Yusuf,

I do believe rel canonical tags merge the link profile of all non-canonical URLs to the one canonical URL.

Also, relying on redirects in this case could be problematic for breadcrumbs.

[Everett]

Hello Marty,

If you have the opportunity to use only ONE URL, to which you will link from all categories - and which will be the one and only canonical for that product - I would use site.com/product/product1. Note the use of a /product/ directory instead of being off the root. I find that having products in a product directory makes diagnoses of issues (i.e. index count, site:domain.com inurl:product searches, Analytics segmentation...) a lot easier. However, if you want to keep it site.com/product1 then that would be fine as well. It would be preferable to using multiple URLs and relying on 301 redirects or rel canonicals, which are effective band-aids, but band-aids nevertheless. It is better to actually fix the problem, which is products living on multiple URLs.

Of course you're going to still want to either 301 redirect or rel canonical the old ones to your canonical version since the URLs are likely already in Google's system and possibly have external links.

And you should think about what happens to breadcrumbs as well. If a user gets to /product1 from one category vs another, will their breadcrumb change and how will that be done? Is it ok for usability for the breadcrumb on that product page to always reference the canonical category (i.e. Home ---> category 2 ---> category2 ---> product1)? I tend to think so, and this also may help your internal linking be more consistent when Googlebot visits the page.

[s_EOgi_Bear]

Thanks for your replys - I'm not really asking the question whether it should be a 301 or Canonical  -  I have the opportunity to make all the links go directly to the correct URL -  or to go to the category and use Canonical.  ( then there would ony be one actual URL )  - just wondering if that is more beneficial as you would have 4-5 links going to the same product page instead of 1 going to the product page and the rest with Canonical URL's .

So if you have any more ideas...???

[KarlBantleman]

The canonical is the right way of setting the website up. When we take on an E-commerce client that has products accessible via multiple URL's is to Google which one has the authority, so if you are looking at product X then google it and see which URL Google is giving the authority to, look at the path then canonical all other variations to that path.

[TranslateMediaLtd]

Hi

I've often wondered about this - whether to use a 301 or leave pages as they are and use the rel=canonical tag.

I would think that a 301 from the duplicate to preferred page would be best. This would mean that any inbound links will pass juice to the preferred page (i.e. site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1). The rel=canonical tag, as far as I know, does not merge the link profile of the duplicate pages.

However, depending on the skill of your developers, other rewrite/redirect rules on your site and your CMS - the rel=canonical might be the only feasible method.

This page explains it very nicely.

http://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use