How to handle dynamic product url that changes regularly

[MH-UK]

Hey Moz,

It's actually my first post - although I look at the Q&As on a daily basis!

I was hoping to get your opinions on how to handle dynamic product url that can change regularly.

Before we start, our product page urls get populated by the product titles.

So the situation is this.

• Let’s say we have a product url: /product/12345-abcde-fghj/
• Then the client decides to change the title a week later, so the url changes with it to): /listing/12345-klm-qjk
• Another week later, the agent changes to: /listing/12345-jkhfk-jhf-kjdhfkjdhf

So to note, the product ID will always remain the same.

Naturally, 301 redirecting every time would cause a bit of page authority to be lost every time 301ed. Also potentially creating new a few hundreds of 301 redirect daily sounds totally mental. (I have been informed by the dev we expect a few hundreds to change url daily) Although I understand there’s no limit on how many 301s you can have on a single domain, this would look completely unnatural - really not ideal.

So the potential solution we thought was:

we’ll keep the original url, and make sure that is the only url that will get indexed**/product/12345-abcde-fghj/**and put canonical tag on any of the new urls, directing to the original url. The problem we will have then is that the most current url may not exactly match the description of the product -wouldn’t be ideal for ux.

Has anyone had dealing with issues like this in the past? Would love to get your input!

Many Thanks

[MH-UK]

Thanks Everett! yes there's definitely seo benefit from having the title in the URL, and I think it's pretty significant - from what I have seen previously when we made a massive url changes for one of the websites I worked on - went from /{id}/ to {id}-{product-title}. Also there is a study shows that display url in search results is still a prominent element to influencing searchers' clicks. This is from 2012 but I think the same still applies today. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/155941/domainbias.pdf so I'd prefer to have the titles included.

It is completely possible to make the very original static, and that would be my preferred option - but we need to assess whether the changes were made because they were "mildly" or "totally" incorrect in the first place, and also at the same time need to convince others - who feel keeping the original urls (when the product titles change) would worsen ux.

301 redirects would be totally mental - so this would not be an option. Also adding canonical tag to the "non-original" urls method - potentially ok in the short term.

I think using static (hardcoded) urls would be the only long-term solution.

[MH-UK]

Hi Patrick that's really helpful thanks,

Completely understand it's confusing, I was totally surprised myself to find out there were so many changes to the title on a daily basis.

I would personally have one static url (original url) so this page can carry on build authority. I'm going to find out what these changes that are being made may be.I mean if it's just the title changing and nothing else, the chances are that the original product title (& url) will still stay relevant - it may be that our clients are trying to optimise their title, or spelling error etc. - I'm not sure at this point but that will be my next job to find out!

I can't link to the site, as it is being worked for relaunch currently. Site relaunches are always terrifying

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

This is very confusing haha. What I would suggest is, if the product itself stays the same while new items or features are added to it (the only reason I can think why URLs are changing - correct?), to create one static URL / page for the product and update the description as the product updates. I would also add Schema into the template of the product so that it dynamically pulls information from the description and let's crawlers know of the changes. You'll have to talk to your web development team to make sure this is possible.

This way, you have one static URL per product, with only descriptions / features changing. This will cut down on multiple URLs, redirects, canonicals, and overall, confusion. I would also take a look at this resource from inFlow; this is on duplicate content for eCommerce which it sounds like you might potentially run into.

Let me know if a. that I am on the right thought pattern here and b. that this helps. You may want to link to your site so that the community can get a more indepth look! Hope this helps - good luck!
Patrick