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
-
How does product category description affect SEO?
Hi - we are a website that sells tours. We have category pages that list the tours in that category (by city, by length of time, theme, etc). At the top of each category page, before the buttons linking to the tours, there is a category description. It is a pretty long paragraph. We are redesigning the website and think it would look nicer to show 2-3 lines of text and then have a down arrow and 'read' more so people can click and it would expand to show the full category description if they want to read it and it won't take up so much room that way. My question is - will this affect SEA at all? Or because the text is still there, just hidden, it won't do anything? Our site ranks very high in organic searches on google and we do not want to do anything that will hurt SEO. thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shirapn0 -
Over-optimizing Internal Linking: Is this real and, if so, what's the happy medium?
I have heard a lot about having a solid internal linking structure so that Google can easily discover pages and understand your page hierarchies and correlations and equity can be passed. Often, it's mentioned that it's good to have optimized anchor text, but not too optimized. You hear a lot of warnings about how over-optimization can be perceived as spammy: https://neilpatel.com/blog/avoid-over-optimizing/ But you also see posts and news like this saying that the internal link over-optimization warnings are unfounded or outdated:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchStan
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-no-internal-linking-overoptimization-penalty-27092.html So what's the tea? Is internal linking overoptimization a myth? If it's true, what's the tipping point? Does it have to be super invasive and keyword stuffy to negatively impact rankings? Or does simple light optimization of internal links on every page trigger this?1 -
Weird behavior with site's rankings
I have a problem with my site's rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mcurius
I rank for higher difficulty (but lower search volume) keywords , but my site gets pushed back for lower difficulty, higher volume keywords, which literally pisses me off. I thought very seriously to start new with a new domain name, cause what ever i do seems that is not working. I will admit that in past (2-3 years ago) i used some of those "seo packages" i had found, but those links which were like no more than 50, are all deleted now, and the domains are disavowed.
The only thing i can think of, is that some how my site got flagged as suspicious or something like that in google. Like 1 month ago, i wrote an article about a topic related with my niche, around a keyword that has difficulty 41%. The search term in 1st page has high authority domains, including a wikipedia page, and i currently rank in the 3rd place. In the other had, i would expect to rank easily for a keyword difficulty of 30-35% but is happening the exact opposite.The pages i try to rank, are not spammy, are checked with moz tools, and also with canirank spam filters. All is good and green. Plus the content of those pages i try to rank have a Content Relevancy Score which varies from 98% to 100%... Your opinion would be very helpful, thank you.0 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Preserving URL Structure from Os Commerce to Magento
I have a website that is built on OS Commerce and I am planning to transition to Magento. I was told that the transition to Magento would change my url structure. How do I preserve my current url structure while migrating to the Magento platform so that I do not lose my backlink profile.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
How to properly link to products from category pages?
Hi All, We have an e-commerce website and the category pages are built so that there is a product image and below it there is the title. Both the image and the title are in a href (each on its own). I encountered the following unfinished discussion here at MOZ:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-optimize-achor-text-links-on-ecommerce-category-page#post-93758 The discussion states that its improper. The question is - if it is wrong then why? (maybe because Google will give its weight to the image anchor instead of the text anchor since it is higher in the page). The other question is how to resolve the matter?
Should I add nofollow to the image href? Thanks0 -
Google Maps results doesn't show my site url but rather the maps url, why is this?
For several of my clients landing pages that show up in the Maps results the website url has been overwritten by the maps url (maps.google.com). Even though on my places page I have the correct website set up. Does anyone have any idea why they would be doing this and how I can correct it? Thanks kinldy in advance, Aaron. maps-url.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | afranklin0 -
Questions regarding Google's "improved url handling parameters"
Google recently posted about improving url handling parameters http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html I have a couple questions: Is it better to canonicalize urls or use parameter handling? Will Google inform us if it finds a parameter issue? Or, should we have a prepare a list of parameters that should be addressed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0