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.
Canonicalising a product with multiple variants
-
I am working with an ecommerce site and have encountered an issue I haven't come across before and would appreciate some advice on how to proceed.
There are multiple variation products with one master product and then up to 20 or 30 variant products, the variation could be colour, size or both. The site has been set up to canonicalise all the variations to the master variant product, which I understand to be best practice. But, this is where the issue occurs, the master variant product URL 302 redirects to one of the variant product URLs. Example below. My question is, is this harmful to our SEO efforts? Would be be best to canonicalise to a preferred colour or size variation?
EXAMPLE:
Master variant product: www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123
Seeing this product on the page and clicking will 302 redirect to www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456
On page www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456 the canonical tag is www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
-
Hi Nick,
Thanks for your response. At the moment we have around 2000 products and some of the canonical pages do rank, others don't so it does seem the search engine in confused.
The article on SiteBulb is really interesting and I agree with your reasoning to canonicalise to either the most vanilla or popular product variant.
Many thanks,
Simon
-
Hi Simon,
Quick question which I think I can guess the answer, does the current canonical page rank for anything at all?
Can't the developers make the canonical a static page (which currently redirects) default to the most popular and or a vanilla combination of product attributes?
That would of course be the best option, failing that you would have to just canonicalise to the most popular product variation and do so in a way that doesn't create a redirect chain.
I literally just referenced SiteBulb in another post, and I don't want to come across like a shill but there's a great explanation of it your issue here: https://sitebulb.com/hints/indexability/canonical-hints/canonical-points-to-a-redirecting-url/
Easier said than done for sure with some CMS and E-Commerce sites, but as the aforementioned link says...it's generally dealt with on a case by case basis.
Appreciate this is isn't a definitive answer but I hope it helps!
Nick
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
-
How can I outrank a website whose brand is named specifically after a product / service (and mine is not!) ?
Hi everyone, I've been working hard on my on-page SEO lately so I can gain visibility for my website. The results have been great and I am now on top of the SERP for the services I propose. I think that my content is almost fully optimize and** I've respected all the best practices (both on-page and technical SEO)**. However, there is one problem I just can't deal with for I don't have the knowledge, hence this post. I'm pretty sure that this issue is quite common for SEO experts. Here the thing: I offer dental emergency services, which is my core business. I'm ranked 4th for that request in my area, which is good, but I'd like to rank 1st as** I have a better DA and content than the 3 websites outranking me**. Also, I'm the first result for any other related services such as "dental services" or "dentist". However, when it comes to the theme "dental emergency", I'm constantly outranked by the same 3 websites. I ran an audit on their website but **my content and technical SEO is way better **than theirs. I suppose that the only reason I'm behind them is because they used "dental emergency" in their **Brand name **and, therefore, in the Home page URL. Every time someone is looking up online for "dental emergency", these websites will be on top of the SERP as I think that Google is unable to know whether the users are specifically looking for their websites (aka Brand) or for "dental emergency" services. Here is an example of a competitor: https://www.urgencedentairedemontreal.com/ (urgence meaning emergency in French). His whole Brand name and URL have been built after the "dental emergency." service. On the contrary, **my Brand name does not mention "urgence". ** I see that as a trick that is confusing Google. The fact that my competitors named their Brand after a specific service I also offer is real pain for my SEO. I also think it's really unfair as I've put a lot of effort in designing a nice website with great UX and content. This is the kind of practice that should be penalized in my opinion. Please, does anyone know any way to resolve this issue?
On-Page Optimization | | AlexTL0 -
Product Descriptions (SEO)
So I would like a few opinions. How long should a product description be? Enough to get the point across? 100 words? 800 words? Over detailed? Any advice would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | mattl990 -
Issues with Multiple H1 tags on homepage?
Hi folks, My homepage has 3 identical H1 tags due to the fact that I have had to create individual hero images (with headings) for desktop, tablet and mobile. I couldn't get my theme to display the layout in exactly the way I wanted on each device without doing a specific hero image and tag for each device type. Does this have a major impact on my SEO? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Veevlimike
Mike.0 -
Do WooCommerce product tags effect SEO?
I'm just curious if I need these product tags and if they impact in any way at all SEO? - whether that be positively or negatively. on1iRin
On-Page Optimization | | xdunningx0 -
How do you make product pages unique when there are thousands of products?
When an ecommerce site has 200 product pages, this is fine. It's time consuming, but I can write 200 unique paragraphs describing the product and it's not an insane amount of work for one person. But when there are 10,000+ product pages... what is the best way for one person to go about this? Risk the page being thin and just bullet point a couple of "need-to-know" info bits, or take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each? Or do you just forego having truly unique copy on each product page and just aim to optimise the category pages for the longtail? Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing... Notes: Product pages already have reviews, helps with adding more unique user-generated content to each page. There's dynamic content e.g. "You may be interested in...", "Related products", etc.
On-Page Optimization | | Ria_3 -
What to do with multiple forms and thank you pages
Hi Everyone, I'm wondering what to do with form and thank you pages. I asked a question a long time ago about the contact page as noindex and was told by people that its better to leave it and write content for it and thats what we did. Now I have a client that does self storage and they have 4 locations and each location has a reservation page with a basic form but no content. Each page also redirects to a thank you page with tracking codes. There's a total of 6 "thank you" pages with different codes (this was done by yellow book). 4 "reserve your storage pages", 2 pages to pay for storage with iframes to 3rd party payment portals. I was told to noindex these pages but I'm not sure so I'm asking here. I was also told to nofollow and remove them from sitemaps. Thanks Aron
On-Page Optimization | | aronwp0 -
How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect
Hi all I hope that someone can help.... How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect The url in question is: How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/search/Category/luxury_hotels_venues_uk_wedding_venues/exclusive_use_venues/letter/c http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/location/uk-england/bedfordshire-weddings/franklin-park http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/deal/location/uk-england/chorley-weddings/curtis-bay etc, going to http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business the above is just a few examples, google webmaster is showing over 8.000 404 page not found errors. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Taiger0 -
Pagination for product page reviews
Hi, I am looking to add pagination on product pages (they have lots of reviews on the page). I am considering using rel="next/prev, to connect the series of review pages to the main product page. I unfortunately don't have a view-all page for these reviews or the option to get one - the reviews refresh on the same product page (by clicking whatever number page of reviews). This means each page has the exact same description content and everything else, but with different reviews. In this case is rel=next a good option? The format currently would be: On example.com/product link rel="next" href="http://example.com/product?review-p2" On example.com/product?review-p2 link rel="prev" href="http://example.com/product, link rel="next" href="http://example.com/product?review-p3 etc. Would this be a good format for product page reviews? I see rel=nextprev commonly used on ecommerce category/list pages but not really on the paginated reviews on product pages, so I thought I would see if anyone has advice on how best to solve this. I'm also wondering if it would be best to not combine this with a canonical tag on all the different review pages pointing to the product page, seeing as the reviews are actually different (despite the rest of the content being identical). I am hoping to pick up longer tail traffic from this, I figure by connecting the pages and not using canonicals that this way I could get more traffic from the phrases used in the reviews. By leaving out the canonicals, is it possible a user searching for phrases that might be deeper in the series, to land on, say, ?review-p4? Any thoughts if this would drive more traffic? Thanks!.
On-Page Optimization | | pikka0