Crawl Budget vs Canonical
-
Got a debate raging here and I figured I'd ask for opinions. We have our websites structured as
site/category/product
This is fine for URL keywords, etc. We also use this for breadcrumbs. The problem is that we have multiple categories into which a category fits. So "product" could also be at
site/cat1/product
site/cat2/product
site/cat3/productObviously this produces duplicate content. There's no reason why it couldn't live under 1 URL but it would take some time and effort to do so (time we don't necessarily have). As such, we're applying the canonical band-aid and calling it good. My problem is that I think this will still kill our crawl budget (this is not an insignificant number of pages we're talking about). In some cases the duplicate pages are bloating a site by 500%.
So what say you all? Do we just simply do canonical and call it good or do we need to take into account the crawl budget and actually remove the duplicate pages. Or am I totally off base and canonical solves the crawl budget issue as well?
-
agreed! we ran into the same problem with content (articles, etc). if you think of it in the same way as blog posts, they each have a unique URL, but with tags (i.e. categories) you are able to get them posted to the appropriate category landing pages.
have a somewhat related issue that i posted here
-
Another great way to go is to not put the category in the product URL. That was usually the best solution when I work on e-commerce sites.
-
Hi Highland,
I would defiantly work on making sure that your product only lives in one category. The canonical tag is a nice little band-aid but it still fix the root of the problem. I would suggest you can have it listed in many different categories but it only lives in one category at the product level. So for instance:
It's displayed here
site/cat1
site/cat2
site/cat3But it only displays product details at a url like this
site/category/product
I'm not a huge fan of having Google crawl 4 or 5 extra pages per product just to find a canonical tag when you could just spend the extra programming time to make it work correctly.
Casey
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
-
AMP vs Responsive Design? Mobile SEO
Hello !! We are developing a new website with responsive design. As is recommended, the idea would be to have a unique site for mobile and desktop, with same content and same url for both devices, using responsive design to adapt the layout depending on the device. My doubt in here is about the AMP pages? If my website has responsive design, perfectly optimized for mobile do I need somehow AMP pages? As far as I understand, these amp pages would be useful if I had different pages for mobile, but this is not the case. Am I correct or am I missing something? Thanks for your help :
Web Design | | AutoEurope1 -
Canonical and Sitemap issue
Hi all, I was told that I could change my homepage Canonical tag to match that of my XML sitemap, this sitemap is being generated for me automatically and shows the homepage as e.g. https://www.mysite.com/index.html, yet my Canonical tag has been set to https://www.mysite.com. Google currently shows as https://www.mysite.com/ being indexed, but https://www.mysite.com/index.html is not currently displayed in search results. Can someone please tell me if I should change the Canonical to the index.html version, or if I should do nothing, or remove the Canonical tag altogether? Thank you for looking.
Web Design | | scarebearz0 -
Ecommerce web design read more toggle vs menu link on home page and product pages
Hello, We have an Ecommerce store. We have a lot of content on the home page and product pages and we are going back and forth between which one to use between a toggle "Read More" "Show Less" toggle for each section and a anchor linked menu. We have long product pages We're thinking a read more toggle is more appropriate for category descriptions so that they can go at the top of the category and not take up space. But the read more toggle with lots of content scrolls the page down and doesn't scroll it back up when you hit "show less" We're leaning towards a linked menu for the home pages and product pages for this reason, but an accordion type set of toggles would look nicer. What do you recommend, and how have you set up your read more toggles if they have lots of info so that they are not confusing? Are there other options? ' Not looking for code (I can do that) I'm looking for ideas on the cleanest home page, category pages, and product pages when they have tons and tons of textual content. Wanting to trim it up and make it look compact and neat! Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Duplicate Content Issue: Mobile vs. Desktop View
Setting aside my personal issue with Google's favoritism for Responsive websites, which I believe doesn't always provide the best user experience, I have a question regarding duplicate content... I created a section of a Wordpress web page (using Visual Composer) that shows differently on mobile than it does on desktop view. This section has the same content for both views, but is formatted differently to give a better user experience on mobile devices. I did this by creating two different text elements, formatted differently, but containing the same content. The problem is that both sections appear in the source code of the page. According to Google, does that mean I have duplicate content on this page?
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Google text-only vs rendered (index and ranking)
Hello, can someone please help answer a question about missing elements from Google's text-only cached version.
Web Design | | cpawsgo
When using JavaScript to display an element which is initially styled with display:none, does Google index (and most importantly properly rank) the elements contents? Using Google's "cache:" prefix followed by our pages url we can see the rendered cached page. The contents of the element in question are viewable and you can read the information inside. However, if you click the "Text-only version" link on the top-right of Google’s cached page, the element is missing and cannot be seen. The reason for this is because the element is initially styled with display:none and then JavaScript is used to display the text once some logic is applied. Doing a long-tail Google search for a few sentences from inside the element does find the page in the results, but I am not certain that is it being cached and ranked optimally... would updating the logic so that all the contents are not made visible by JavaScript improve our ranking or can we assume that since Google does return the page in its results that everything is proper? Thank you!0 -
Responsive Vs Mobile Sites
I know this is some cutting edge technology, but I think that this will be a very important topic in the coming months, as html5/css3 becomses more and more the standard, or at least standardized, I think the topic of this in relation to SEO will also arise much more. My question is simple, is it better to code a responsive site, or a completely mobile site for a small company with no special needs (mobile ordering, ecommerce, etc...) I obviously know the visuall differences, and, personally, I think respomsive websites look better. From an seo perspective, my big thing is for the resizing, for example, with WordPress, when you reach the tablet size you can set the sidebar to basically display:none, can that impact your website? I would really appreciate any feedback
Web Design | | ZacharyRussell0 -
How will engines deal with duplicate head elements e.g. title or canonicals?
Obviously duplicate content is never a good thing...on separate URL's. Question is, how will the engines deal with duplicate meta tags on the same page. Example Head Tag: <title>Example Title - #1</title> <title>Example Title - #2</title> My assumption is that Google (and others) will take the first instance of the tag, such that "Example Title - #1" and canonical = "http://www.example.com" would be considered for ranking purposes while the others are disregarded. My assumption is based on how SE's deal with duplicate links on a page. Is this a correct assumption? We're building a CMS-like service that will allow our SEO team to change head tag content on the fly. The easiest solution, from a dev perspective, is to simply place new/updated content above the preexisting elements. I'm trying to validate/invalidate the approach. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PCampolo0 -
Development site accidentally crawled - Will this cause problems?
We are currently developing a new version of our website and to make it easy to access for all team members, we just set it up on a server accessible via a publicly accessible domain name (ie devsite.com). There has been no SEO and no links created to this site, or so I thought. Recently, I found out that Google somehow found its way to this development site and has been indexing the pages! I was a little alarmed, as there are no links to the domain and we'll soon be transitioning all the content over to our primary production domain. I immediately created a robots.txt file to disallow access to the entire development domain. My fear is that there may be some duplicate content penalty if Google sees that the content that is on our new site (once it goes live and is pushed to our REAL domain name) was previously indexed on our test domain. We're slated to launch in 2-3 weeks. Is there anything else I should do? Should I even be worried? I'm probably a bit paranoid, but given the amount of time and effort that has gone into this new site, I love any advice or thoughts. Thank You!
Web Design | | AndrewY0