URL path randomly changing
-
Hi eveyone,
got a quick question about URL structures:
I'm currently working in ecommerce with a site that has hundreds of products that can be accessed through different URL paths:
2)www.domain.com/category/productx
3)www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx
4)www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx
5)...
In order to get rid of dublicate content issues, the canoncial tag has been installed on all the pages required. The problem I'm witnessing now is the following:
If a visitor comes to the site and navigates to the product through example 2) at time the URL shown in the URL browser box is example 4), sometimes example 1) or whatever. So it is constantly changing.
Does anyone know, why this happens and if it has any impact on GA tracking or even on SEO peformance.
Any reply is much appreciated
Thanks you
-
If that was the final product page, then yes, you should be using a standard htacess rewrite command to ensure that the final product urls are always www.domain.com/productx But in saying that, the way you had it is totally fine if all the other url possibilities have a canonical tag that points back to optimised version (original product url - www.domain.com/productx)
The htacess rewrite it's not something you should be handling manually. Magento has that option inbuilt into it. It would be a fair amount of work if you had to do that manually. and I would just run with the canonical option if that were the case. Any good eCommerce platform should have the inbuilt ability to automatically remove the category folders and other search queries from the final product url.
Sometimes it's ok to leave the category folders in the url, it just depends on the products being sold. Below would be an example where I would leave the category folders in the url if I was selling different colored soccer balls.
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/black-white/
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/blue-white/
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/red-yellow/ -
Hi Richard,
thanks a lot for your reply.
Let me clarify: productx is a final product page (not a category page with a variety of products). This means that my productx page basically corresponds to your /final-product example.
According to your post and the htaccess command mention, I assume, that it does not cause problems, if the URL shown in the browser does not correspond to the one, the user actually took?
So no matter if a customer comes to the final product page through 1) 2) 3) 4). The URL shown could always be 1) and thats fine. Is that what you ment?
Thanks in advance
-
Those paths all seem fine as they are all legitimate ways of getting to that bunch of products. I'm also assuming that the final page on each of the below urls is a page that contains a selection of products and you can still click on an individual product from the list and go to its url.
1)www.domain.com/productx
2)www.domain.com/category/productx
3)www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx
4)www.domain.com/bestsellers/productxIt's even debatable whether you need canonical tags on any of those above urls, it all depends on how different those pages are from each other with regards to the content on the page before the products. If all of those above urls had different H1 tags and different content before the product feed then they are all stand alone legitimate pages that don't need canonical tags. But if they're all virtually the same and not much customization has been done to the auto generated pages then yes, they should all have a canonical tag back to www.domain.com/productx perhaps, or the most suitable page.
A bigger issue I think you may have is the url of the final single product page. It shouldn't be like this:
www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx/final-product/
or like this either:
www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx/final-product/Optimally, it should read like this no matter how the visitor got there:
www.domain.com/final-product/In most cases, for optimal Seo, an extension, plugin, or htaccess command should rewrite the final product url to strip out all of the category url paths or best seller url paths from the urls so your final product page url is short and clean like this: www.domain.com//final-product/ even though the path is really ths: www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx/final-product/
It's pretty hard to tell what the optimal solution for your site is without having a look at it and understanding your product range and categorization a bit better, but I hope that helps a bit.
-
Thanks for your reply Hector,
The way, the pages are structured on our site is the way 99% of ecommerce business have them structured so that is not the issue here. It's more the path itself that concerns me a bit.
Cheers,
-
It is a technical issue with your ecommerce platform. Definitely it is not good to have that kind of different URLs.
Canonicals are helpful with pages where you cannot do anything but having two similar pages on your site, or when there are almost identical pages. But when dealing with such an important page on an Internet project like the product page on a ecommerce site, you should definitely take action and manage to have unique URLs for every product, not depending of the path the visitor follows to reach that page.
It will become difficult to measure conversion rates or any other KPI on Analytics, and also will become a problem in SEO, with so many different pages to link.
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
-
Change theme or domain first?
I bought a new domain and I want to use it instead of my current domain for my website. I also want to change my theme. Which should I do first? At the time I have my new domain forwarded to my current domain.
Technical SEO | | tfuentez0 -
Affiliate Url & duplicate content
Hi i have checked passed Q&As and couldn't find anything on this so thought I would ask.
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram
I have recently noticed my URLS adding the following to the end: mydomain.com/?fullweb=1 I cant seem to locate where these URLS are coming from and how this is being created? This is causing duplicate content on google. I wanted to know ig anyone has had any previous experience with something like this? If anyone has any information on this it would be a great help. thanks E0 -
Would these be considered dynamic URLs?
Hi, I have a (brand) new client (outdoor recreation), and it links to many different lodges. It's built in Wordpress (Pagelines), and the partner page link URLs. Although they do have the "?" in there, it's only has a single parameter. http://www.clientsite/?partners=partner-name Google is indexing the URLs, I do plan to increase the amount of content/on-page for each. Yet, weighing the risk/reward of rewriting all of these URLs.
Technical SEO | | csmithal0 -
Removing URL Parentheses in HTACCESS
Im reworking a website for a client, and their current URLs have parentheses. I'd like to get rid of these, but individual 301 redirects in htaccess is not practical, since the parentheses are located in many URLs. Does anyone know an HTACCESS rule that will simply remove URL parantheses as a 301 redirect?
Technical SEO | | JaredMumford0 -
What is your opinion on ideal url structure?
Which url structure do you think is better... website.com/CO/denver/555-your-address-way-denver-co-55678/98347578 or website.com/classifying-keyword/555_your_address_way-denver_colorado-55678-98347578 orrr website.com/classifying-keyword/555-your-address-way-denver-colorado-55678-98347578
Technical SEO | | jessefriedman0 -
Can I redirect a URL that has a # in it? How?
Hi there - My web developer is saying that I can't do a URL redirect with a "#" in it. Currently, the URL is actually an anchored link within a page (which the URL indicates with a #). I want to change the content to a new URL, but our website links internally to the old URL, so we would need to do a URL redirect (assume 301). Can you tell me if this is possible and how? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | sfecommerce0 -
Duplicate canonical URLs in WordPress
Hi everyone, I'm driving myself insane trying to figure this one out and am hoping someone has more technical chops than I do. Here's the situation... I'm getting duplicate canonical tags on my pages and posts, one is inside of the WordPress SEO (plugin) commented section, and the other is elsewhere in the header. I am running the latest version of WordPress 3.1.3 and the Genesis framework. After doing some testing and adding the following filters to my functions.php: <code>remove_action('wp_head', 'genesis_canonical'); remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');</code> ... what I get is this: With the plugin active + NO "remove action" - duplicate canonical tags
Technical SEO | | robertdempsey
With the plugin disabled + NO "remove action" - a single canonical tag
With the plugin disabled + A "remove action" - no canonical tag I have tried using only one of these remove_actions at a time, and then combining them both. Regardless, as long as I have the plugin active I get duplicate canonical tags. Is this a bug in the plugin, perhaps somehow enabling the canonical functionality of WordPress? Thanks for your help everyone. Robert Dempsey0 -
My urls changed with new CMS now search engines see pages as 302s what do I do?
We recently changed our CMS from php to .NET. The old CMS did not allow for folder structure in urls so every url was www.mydomain/name-of-page. In the new CMS we either have to have .aspx at the end of the url or a /. We opted for the /, but now my page rank is dead and Google webmaster tools says my existing links are now going through an intermediary page. Everything resolves to the right place, but looks like spiders see our new pages as being 302 redirected. Example of what's happening. Old page: www.mydomain/name-of-page New page: www.mydomain/name-of-page/ What should I do? Should I go in and 301 redirect the old pages? Will this get cleared up by itself in time?
Technical SEO | | rasiadmin10