Canonical sitemap URL different to website URL architecture

[MikeSutcliffe]

Hi,

This may or may not be be an issue, but would like some SEO advice from someone who has a deeper understanding. I'm currently working on a clients site that has a bespoke CMS built by another development agency.

The website currently has a sitemap with one link - EG: www.example.com/category/page. This is obviously the page that is indexed in search engines. However the website structure uses www.example.com/page, this isn't indexed in search engines as the links are canonical. The client is also using the second URL structure in all it's off and online advertising, internal links and it's also been picked up by referral sites. I suspect this is not good practice... however I'd like to understand whether there are any negative SEO effectives from this structure? Does Google look at both pages with regard to visits, pageviews, bounce rate, etc. and combine the data OR just use the indexed version?

www.example.com/category/page - 63.5% of total pageviews
www.example.com/page - 34.31% of total pageviews

Thanks
Mike

[StephanSolomonidis]

Hi Mike,

Ideally, yes, you'd just have the one URL. If you were setting up a site from scratch, I would tell you to avoid having the same content on those two different pages, because we don't want to create any duplication where it isn't strictly necessary. An example of when it is strictly necessary would be something like a ?sort_products parameter which changes the order products are displayed on a page. There's no way to do that without some duplication, so the canonical tag is useful. It's good practice to avoid having more versions of the page than you need because it reduces the number of ways things can go wrong.

But as this structure is already in place and seems to be working OK -- only one version of the page is indexed -- I would leave it as it is. Messing around with the canonical now will likely do more harm than good. There aren't any definite negative effects for your SEO by leaving things as they are.

As for your question about aggregation, I assume you mean in Google Analytics? No metrics will be aggregated there -- the two pages will appear as separate URLs in your reports. The aggregation that matters for indexation is link equity. When you get links to example.com/page, it will help the rankings of the example.com/category/page URL because that's the canonical version.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hey Mike,

No as you're describing it it should cause issues for you as what you're doing is the right way to pick this up with the canonical.

Martijn.