Assigning WooCommerce products to more than one category - Correct methodology?
-
I manage a store selling prescription glasses, many of which are unisex or apply to more than one category.
I have already assigned the canonical URL for each category, but my question is, if a product appears in more than one category, do I need to set the canonical URL in each product to reflect the category I want it to index under? Therefore, any additional categories that product appears in simply refers the link value back to the canonical URL.
I note that in Yoast, under each product, there's note in the canonical setting to leave it empty to default to permalink, so this has confused me a little. I'm just concerned that by applying a product to multiple categories, it may be causing duplicate content, as I have a lot of duplicate issues which I'll raise in another question.
Thanks!
-
You would not set the canonical URL on the product page to your preferred category, that would send the signal that instead of having the product URL rank in search, you would prefer one of the product's categories, which would be incorrect.
It sounds like since you've already set a canonical URL for certain categories, so you're on the right track. For instance if you have 5 categories with very similar lists of products on those pages, it sounds like you are canonicalizing 4 of those pages to the 1 most authoritative of the 5.
In summary, you would only set a canonical for a product page if you had the same exact product spread across 5 different product pages. For example, if you had /mens-glasses/versace-primo/ and then for some reason every color had its own page because of your system, such as /mens-glasses/versace-primo/black, /mens-glasses/versace-primo/blue, /mens-glasses/versace-primo/red - then you would need the canonical on the product page back to the main page without the color subfolder.
To address a part of your question, it's generally ok to assign the same product to multiple categories if that's useful to the user. Unless you have a massive site and you're maxing out your crawl budget, I don't think you need to sweat too much on duplicate content issues, unless you're receiving really strong negative signals. For instance, Moz might show that some of your pages are duplicate, but it's more informational, and you don't always need to take sweeping action.
One strategy to fix duplicate content issues on category pages, is to write unique content for each category page and make the category page an actual destination page rather than just a navigational page.
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
-
Introduce customer reviews and ratings onto our product pages
Hi, I'm looking to introduce historical customer reviews onto our product pages but i want an opinion on whether a product page that's indexed will jump from 0 reviews to possible 30+, what if any problems that could arise from this.. For a bit of background, we've been collecting customer reviews/ratings since 2015 on our internal system. I'm only looking to start using feedback from 2020 onwards. The current set up is that the product page will display the latest 30 reviews, on the same page is a link that will take the user to another page where they can review all the customer feedback. I'm using Google Schema to markup the text to ensure it is firstly understood by google and displays correctly too. So back to my original question. Will an e-commerce product page that currently has no customer reviews that is indexed, been seen differently if when the next time it's crawled its found to have, say 30+ reviews? Are there any implications this way? What's your experience? I look forward to reading your feedback.
Technical SEO | | Train4Academy.co.uk
Thanks0 -
Same URL names in one domain
Hi All, I have 9 different subdirectories for languages in the same domain example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages. I know it is better to translate URLs, but we won't for now, because all the NON-ASCII characters. But we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at least for the main domain URLs? www.example.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
How to handle dynamic product url that changes regularly
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
Technical SEO | | MH-UK0 -
Tags, Categories, & Duplicate Content
Looking for some advice on a duplicate content issue that we're having that definitely isn't unique to us. See, we are allowing all our tag and category pages, as well as our blog pagination be indexed and followed, but Moz is detecting that all as duplicate content, which is obvious since it is the same content that is on our blog posts. We've decided in the past to keep these pages the way they are as it hasn't seemed to hurt us specifically and we hoped it would help our overall ranking. We haven't seen positive or negative signals either way, just the warnings from Moz. We are wondering if we should noindex these pages and if that could cause a positive change, but we're worried it might cause a big negative change as well. Have you confronted this issue? What did you decide and what were the results? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | bradhodson0 -
Repetition of Product Names considered Spamming?
We have long lists of products are displayed on individual web pages ... with the only variations being in product dimensions and prices. Could the Search Engines consider these lengthy lists of products for sale to be attempted spamming efforts? (Example: http://www.just-insulation.com/overview_of_celotex_product_buy_cheapest.html) Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Collie0 -
Same product in Multiple categories ecommerce store, best way to avoid duplicate content?
Hello All, Im building a magento store, with around 500 products. One thing is that I am going to have some products in Multiple categories. Do you think the best solution is to remove any category name from the url structure or would this devalue SEO? Also would the use of canonical links remove any duplicate content issues if the category name was left in. So overall what would get better results No category name in URL (e.g.phonename-model1.html) V category name in url (e.g. phones/phonename-model1.html / videophones/phonename-model1.html +using canonical links Any feedback or views would be great
Technical SEO | | voipme0 -
Index Category Archives?
I'm using Wordpress categories to add products. Normally I normally noindex category archives to prevent duplicate content issues, with the blog page serving as the index, but I don't have one with this site http://66.147.244.50/~proflowc/ Should I index the category archives to ensure that products are indexed, or will Google see them anyway?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Merging two sites into one
I have two websites, www.joecline.com and www.affinityproperties.com. Originally, I wanted joecline.com to be focused on west austin only. I now realize that I only have time to really handle the promotion of one site. I'm wondering SEOwise, which url would be better to keep. I would consolidate all content on one site and 301 the migrated site to the new URLs in the domain which I would keep. Any ideas would be great. Thanks Joe
Technical SEO | | simplesimon0