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
-
SEO impact: Link categories on the description of the products
Hi, Is there any positive or negative SEO impact if I link product categories on the description of the products? Ex: At the product page of the Passenger Car Blue, a link to the Passenger Car category of the website on the product description. Or this is more a UX question?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
The product page already has a breadcrumb on top. Thanks!0 -
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Similar product descriptions but with different urls
I had this question before and was not fully satisfied with the answer.. We are selling adhesives and some of the products have the same name and description, the only thing that separates them are the width on the roll.. Are old/online setup are as following, each product has its own product page with more or less the same description. For example here http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-2-100/ and here http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-2-150/ The above product pages are for a product called Fentrim 2. its availiable in widhts from 75 to 300mm.. so, its six diffent products pages with more or less the same description. The other variations of the products besides the width. are Fentrim 20, Fentrim IS 2 and Fentrim IS 20. So this gives us 6 x Fentrim 20 product pages with the same description, just the width that changes. 6 x Fentrim 2 product pages with the same description, just the width that changes. 6 x Fentrim IS 20 product pages with the same description, just the width that changes. 6 x Fentrim IS 2 product pages with the same description, just the width that changes. I get that this can cause us problems in the terms of duplicate content. The plan that we have now is to have 4 different product pages with variations instead. For each of those for product pages we have well written and unique content. And have the old ones 301 redirected to them. Like this http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-2 http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-20 http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-IS-2 http://siga-sverige.se/siga/fentrim-IS-20 Today we gain traffic from one product page per variation and it seems that google has picked those ones out randomly, see the attached screenshot.. Will we loose rank? will this increase our position, whats your ideas? // Jonas PG4aAcM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knubbz0 -
Pagination and View All Pages Question. We currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to View all as I don't believe it's a good user experience so how best we deal with this.
Hello All, I have an eCommerce site and have implemented the use rel="prev" and rel="next" for Page Pagination. However, we also have a View All which shows all the products but we currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to this as I don't believe showing the user a page with shed loads of products on it is actually a good user experience so we havent done anything with this page. I have a sample url from one of our categories which may help - http://goo.gl/9LPDOZ This is obviously causing me duplication issues as well . Also , the main category pages has historically been the pages which ranks better as opposed to Page 2, Page 3 etc etc. I am wondering what I should do about the View All Page and has anyone else had this same issue and how did they deal with it. Do we just get rid of the View All even though Google says it prefers you to have it ? I also want to concentrate my link juice on the main category pages as opposed being diluted between all my paginated pages ? - Does anyone have any tips on how to best do this and have you seen any ranking improvement from this ? Any ideas greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index
6 months ago my clients site was overhauled and the user generated searches had an index tag on them. I switched that to noindex but didn't get it fast enough to avoid being 100's of pages indexed in Google. It's been months since switching to the noindex tag and the pages are still indexed. What would you recommend? Google crawls my site daily - but never the pages that I want removed from the index. I am trying to avoid submitting hundreds of these dynamic URL's to the removal tool in webmaster tools. Suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Wordpress.com content feeding into site's subdomain, who gets SEO credit?
I have a client who had created a Wordpress.com (not Wordpress.org) blog, and feeds blog posts into a subdomain blog.client-site.com. My understanding was that in terms of SEO, Wordpress.com would still get the credit for these posts, and not the client, but I'm seeing conflicting information. All of the posts are set with permalinks on the client's site, such as blog.client-site.com/name-of-post, and when I run a Google site:search query, all of those individual posts appear in the Google search listings for the client's domain. Also, I've run a marketing.grader.com report, and these same results are seen. Looking at the source code on the page, however, I see this information which leads me to believe the content is being credited to, and fed in from, Wordpress.com ('client name' altered for privacy): href="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg">class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-2050" title="Could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster" src="http://client-name.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/could_you_survive_a_computer_disaster.jpeg?w=150&h=143" I'm looking to provide a recommendation to the client on whether they are ok to continue moving forward with this current setup, or whether we should port the blog posts over to a subfolder on their primary domain www.client-site.com/blog and use Wordpress.org functionality, for proper SEO. Any advice?? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
Why does google not show my ecommerce category page when I have the same keywords for many products in the product title?
I have found that google removes the google serach listing of a category from my site (ecommerce) when products within the category have the same key words. I sell golf shirts and have a category called "Mens Golf Shirts" Within the category I have added many products but when the too many of the products say mens golf shirt my link on google gets removed. Before i had products named: FUNKTION Mens Short Sleeve Golf Shirt Red / Black but now I have had to change it to: FUNKTION Red / Black I can understand that they may see this a keyword stuffing but how do I get around this to ensure that each product can rank on google for mens golf shirt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | funktiongolf0 -
Best Product URL For Indexing
My proposed URL: mydomain.com/products/category/subcategory/product detail Puts my products 4 levels deep. Is this too deep to get my products indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waynekolenchuk0