Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
-
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes
I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color),
Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL
My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
-
If the canonical page disappears when it's out of stock, the user will get a 404 error when they try to access that URL. You'll need to canonicalize duplicates to a generic product or category page that won't disappear when the product is out of stock. Furthermore, if a product goes out of stock and you'll have more in stock later, it's best (for SEO purposes) to leave the page with an "out of stock" notice rather than remove it completely from the website.
-
I have a similar query. However in my case if the out of stock item is discontinued the page is removed but available product variations may remain.
What happens in the case where my canonical is out of stock and the page removed but other product variations are available?
Thanks,
-
To my knowledge, the behavior of the googlebot is not influenced by whether or not the product is out of stock. Is the page still accessible when the product is out of stock, or does it not display at all?
If the product page remains with an "out of stock" message, that's what users from search will see. If the product page becomes inaccessible when it goes out of stock temporarily, users from search will likely see a 404 page.
You may want to canonicalize to a higher level category page rather than one of the product variation pages. That way, it won't be an issue if one product variation goes out of stock.
May I ask which ecommerce software you are using?
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
-
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
Unique page for each product variant? (Not eCommerce)
Hi Mozzers, Just looking for a little advice before I launch into a huge workload. We have landing pages for vehicle manufacturers. We then have anchor links in that page for each vehicle model that manufacturer has, with further info on the model further down the page. So we're toying with the idea of launching a unique page for each of the models rather than having them all on the same landing page. This will take an age and a minute but if it is worth it, we want to do it. Do you guys see a benefit to having unique pages for each model? Do you think it would attract more natural links? Would this help or hinder the manufacturer landing page in general? Should the manufacturer landing page be noindex so as to avoid duplicate content issues? I can see a lot of work and risk, just looking for a few opinions. PM for more info. Thanks a lot people, Jamie
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles from Weebly Blog
Anyone familiar with Weebly that can offer some suggestions? I ran a crawl diagnostics on my site and have some high priority issues that appear to stem from Weebly Blog posts. There are several of them and it appears that the post is being counted as "page content" on the main blog feed and then again when it is tagged to a category. I hope this makes sense, I am new to SEO and this is really confusing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CRMI0 -
How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?
Hi, I have a webshop with products with different sizes and colours. For each item I have a different URL, with almost the same content (title tag, product descriptions, etc). In order to prevent duplicated content I'am wondering what is the best way to solve this problem, keeping in mind: -Impossible to create one page/URL for each product with filters on colour and size -Impossible to rewrite the product descriptions in order to be unique I'm considering the option to canonicolize the rest of de colours/size variations, but the disadvantage is that in case the product is not in stock it disappears from the website. Looking forward to your opinions and solutions. Jeroen
Technical SEO | | Digital-DMG0 -
how to set rel canonical on wordpress.com sites
I know how to do this with a wordpress.org site but I have a client that does not want to switch and without a plugin I am lost. any help would be greatly appreciated. Jeremy Wood
Technical SEO | | SOtBOrlando0 -
Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's
I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience. This is where my head starts to hurt! Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size). My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this: a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page. b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right. Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page? I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. . Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well? Kind regards Tom
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0