Problem: Magento prioritises product URL's without categories?
-
HI there, we are moving a website from Shoptrader to Magento, which has 45.000 indexations.
yes shoptrader made a bit of a mess. Trying to clean it up now.- there is a 301 redirect list of all old URL's pointing to the new
- one product can exist in multiple categories
- want to solve this with canonical url’s for instance:
- shoptrader.nl/categorieA/product has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product
- shoptrader.nl/categorieA/product-5531 has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product
- shoptrader.nl/categorieA/product¤cy=GBP has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product
- shoptrader.nl/categorieB/product has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieB/product, has canonical tag towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product
- shoptrader.nl/categorieB/product?language=nl has 301 redirect towards magento.nl/nl/categorieB/product, has canonical tag towards magento.nl/nl/categorieA/product
Her comes the problem:
New developer insists on using /productname as canonical instead of /category/category/productname, since Magento says so.The idea is now to redirect to /category/category/productname and there will be a canonical URL on these pages pointing to /productname, loosing some link juice twice. So in the end indexation will take place on /productname … if Google picks it up the 301 + canonical. Would be more adviseable to direct straight to /productname (http://moz.com/community/q/is-link-juice-passed-through-a-301-and-a-canonical-tag), but I prefer to point to one URL with categories attached. Which has more advantages(?):
- clear menustructure
- able to use subfolders in mobile searchresults
- missing breadcrumb
What would you say?
-
Not to muddy up the conversation too much, but I wouldn't try to keep the category paths in product URLs as the canonical. What happens when you have one product in multiple categories? I would make .com/products/product-name as the canonical URL in the rel canonical tag. What you choose to show in the URL bar for the purpose of user experience and breadcrumb consistency is a different story. I hope I am understanding your situation correctly.
-
Sure no problem. That is what I would do ín that case. The best theoretical thing is to redirect all URLs to the best matching page and use /category/subcategory/page and make sure that DC is not an issue. However, with Magento, I have seen many issues with redirects going bad, and my strategy is now more time focused
-
Hi,
The magento extension mentioned in the stackoverflow link above might do what you need. If you have thousands of products it can get time consuming planning and setting it all up and then keeping an eye on them all to make sure the canonicals are working as expected - thats what I meant by might not be worth the effort. If you are ready to put in the initial work then no reason not to give that extension a try and see if it does what you need (I don't think that extension was around the last time I set up a magento shop!).
-
To your opinion, could this be a solution to keep the categories in URL's ... as canonicals?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14476579/seo-category-and-product-path-url-magentowhat do you mean, might not be worth the effort? will it take something like one work week to accomplish this?
-
HI Lynn, thx for your time and effort to reply and share your professional knowledge as well.
and especially thx for the extra bit of knowledge ... did not know you could really influence that "If you have some super products with loads of external links to a /category/product page then that page might well appear in the serps anyway regardless of the canonical" ... knowing that canonical is a suggestion
-
Thx René! so glad with your professional point of view! Glad to know we are working in the correct direction. pfoeh.
-
HI,
If the 301s are mainly to redirect the old site to the new then I would redirect to/category/category/productname.
Since individual product pages rarely pick up a lot of external links (your case might be an exception) then you are not really losing any 'link juice' anyway. If you have some super products with loads of external links to a /category/product page then that page might well appear in the serps anyway regardless of the canonical (canonical is a suggestion not a hard rule).
There are ways to fiddle with the magento setup to allow for more customization of the canonical url for any given product and/or to 'create' breadcrumbs for /product pages but it will need a fair amount of custom coding and might not be worth the effort.
If it all gets to be too much - I would go with the /category/category/product 301s and then canonical to /product and be done with it. My two cents!
-
Most often the problem with Magento is DC and the recommendation is to use /category/subcategory/ for breadcrumbs and normal navigation and then use /product for the actual product page.
I agree that common UX dictates that it should more like, /category/subcategory/product, but Magento (and other e-commerce CMS) have issues with making more than one URL for a product.
I would stick to /product and make the necessary 301 redirects.
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
-
Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
Is it necessary to use Google's Structured Data Markup or alternative for my B2B site?
Hi, We are in the process of going through a re-design for our site. Am trying to understand if we need to use some sort of structured data either from Google Structured data or schema. org?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Krausch0 -
SEO Impact & Google Impact On Removing Product From Category Page for Ecommerce Site
Hello Experts, For my Ecommerce site previously I was showing products at category pages i.e. first all subcategories name after that list all products of all subcateogries. That also approx per category 500 products via load more feature. My query is now I am planning to show products only at Product Listing Page and not on Category pages so what will be SEO impact and how google will treat this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johny123450 -
Any issue? Redirect 100's of domains into one website's internal pages
Hi all, Imagine if you will I was the owner of many domains, say 100 demographically rich kwd domains & my plan was to redirect these into one website - each into a different relevant subfolder. e.g. www.dewsburytilers..com > www.brandname.com/dewsbury/tilers.html www.hammersmith-tilers.com > www.brandname.com/hammersmith/tilers.html www.tilers-horsforth.com > www.brandname.com/horsforth/tilers.html another hundred or so 301 redirects...the backlinks to these domains were slim but relevant (the majority of the domains do not have any backlinks at all - can anyone see a problem with this practice? If so, what would your recommendations be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fergclaw0 -
What's the best way to redirect categories & paginated pages on a blog?
I'm currently re-doing my blog and have a few categories that I'm getting rid of for housecleaning purposes and crawl efficiency. Each of these categories has many pages (some have hundreds). The new blog will also not have new relevant categories to redirect them to (1 or 2 may work). So what is the best place to properly redirect these pages to? And how do I handle the paginated URLs? The only logical place I can think of would be to redirect them to the homepage of the blog, but since there are so many pages, I don't know if that's the best idea. Does anybody have any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kking41200 -
New gTLD's, buy or wait and see?
Is the new gTLD scheme from ICANN worth the money? I manage a brand relatively well-known in our own market segment. Would I benefit from moving from .com and national TLDs for my international sites to my own brand TLD? Are there any obvious SEO pros and cons?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KnutDSvendsen0 -
Most Painless way of getting Duff Pages out of SE's Index
Hi, I've had a few issues that have been caused by our developers on our website. Basically we have a pretty complex method of automatically generating URL's and web pages on our website, and they have stuffed up the URL's at some point and managed to get 10's of thousands of duff URL's and pages indexed by the search engines. I've now got to get these pages out of the SE's indexes as painlessly as possible as I think they are causing a Panda penalty. All these URL's have an addition directory level in them called "home" which should not be there, so I have: www.mysite.com/home/page123 instead of the correct URL www.mysite.com/page123 All these are totally duff URL's with no links going to them, so I'm gaining nothing by 301 redirects, so I was wondering if there was a more painless less risky way of getting them all out the indexes (IE after the stuff up by our developers in the first place I'm wary of letting them loose on 301 redirects incase they cause another issue!) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0