Site build in the 80% of canonical URLs - What is the impact on visibility?

[_JediMindBender]

Hey Everyone,

I represent international wall decorations store where customer can freely choose a pattern to be printed on a given material among a few milions of patterns. Due to extreme large number of potential URL combinations we struggle with too many URL adressess for a months now (search console notifications). So we finally decided to reduce amount of products with canonical tag. Basing on users behavior, our business needs and monthly search volume data we selected 8 most representative out of 40 product categories and made them canonical toward the rest.

For example: If we chose 'Canvas prints' as our main product category, then every 'Framed canvas' product URL points rel=canonical tag toward its equivalent URL within 'Canvas prints' category. We applied the same logic to other categories (so "Vinyl wall mural - Wild horses running" URL points rel=canonical tag to "Wall mural - Wild horses running" URL, etc).

In terms of Googlebot interpretation, there are really tiny differences between those Product URLs, so merging them with rel=canonical seems like a valid use. But we need to keep those canonicalised URLs for users needs, so we can`t remove them from a store as well as noindex does not seem like an good option.

However we`re concerned about our SEO visibility - if we make those changes, our site will consist of ~80% canonical URLs (47,5/60 millions). Regarding your experience, do you have advices how should we handle that issue?

Regards
JMB

[_JediMindBender]

Thanks for your opinion David.We use a dedicated solution based on Symphony framework but we migrate to Kohana currently - thats why we decided its good time to make changes in the SEO field as well.

[davebuts]

Hi JMB,

I agree with Andy and think what you've done will work well.

What CMS does the site use?

I've worked on plenty of big Magento e-commerce sites (from 5k to 5mil pages - so not quite your 60 mil!), but Magento handles this kind of thing very well by default, and in much the same way you have described.

Magento always canonicalizes product URLs to the base URL, no matter what product category they are in.

Eg. a product could be available under multiple categories and it will always use the same canonical tag:

yoursite.com/category-1/product-name/
yoursite.com/category-1/sub-cat/product-name/
yoursite.com/category-1/sub-cat-2/product-name/
yoursite.com/category-2/product-name/

All of these variations would be canonicalized to:

yoursite.com/product-name/

This works perfectly and I've never seen any issues with this.

The only difference with yours is that products are canonicalized to a main category - which actually sounds better to me because then the canonical URL is actually linked from the site (not just "linked" through canonical tags).

I think you'll see some great results with what you've done! But it might take a few months to see the results on a site that size!

Cheers,

David

[_JediMindBender]

Yes I mean in terms of organic search positions. We have solid UX team, and all the other channels are very well covered.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

When you say the site is under-performing, are you talking just in terms of search positions or once you get visitors there as well? Is the UX all in order and have you completed tests to make sure people are navigating their way around correctly?

-Andy

[_JediMindBender]

Hey Andy, thanks for your response. We decided to do it right know because of major website changes we are going through currently (framework, layout, tree category etc.). There was no significant organic traffic drop but site is underperforming in general, and we excluded other explanations such as backlink profile or strong competitors.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi JMB,

What you have done sounds like it makes sense. A little awkward to visualise, but reducing duplication / similar pages through the use of rel=canonical is the right thing to do.

Aside from search console, was there a drop in the SERP's that made you want to do something about this?

Regarding SEO, don't worry about your site having so many canonical pages. The root page is there for indexing while the canonical pages are needed for the user - it sounds to me like you are doing the right thing.

-Andy