Canonical tag for similar page with different theme.
-
Our commerce system allows products to be shared across multiple categories/sections of our site. E.G.
/boxes/blue-box.html
/circles/blue-box.html
This enables the product to show up in different areas of the site, but does not link to an evergreen URL. We are considering using the canonical tag to resolve this issue, but our question relates to the similarity of the pages.
Each section folder (e.g. /boxes/ and /circles/) has a different header, left navigation and footer. They are similar in layout and some content is the same, but a good portion is different in the header and nav. Each category nav basically deals with deeper links in it's own category.
The product title, image, description, etc. is all the same and makes up the bulk of the page. Is this a good candidate for the canonical tag or should we attempt to accommodate an evergreen URL?
-
One static URL that can be found by your users from within any of the categories that the product is in would probably be best. That way there is no chance of duplicate content issues if the search engines were to find both and not resolve the canonical tag.
Really, I think it could go either way. Whichever one is easiest to implement in your particular situation, unless there are a lot of inbound links to your products. If that is the case, changing the URLs would require 301 redirects from the old URLs.
-
The canonical would be the quickest to implement for us, but the evergreen URL wouldn't be a huge deal to implement either after we took a look at it. Is there an advantage to one versus the other?
-
SE's can tell(for the most part) what is your content what is your header and what is your nav and footer, when looking for duplicate content, tehy are not concerned about the nav footer and header, they are concerned with your content.
-
I would use canonical in this situation. That way you won't have to rework all your navigation to have a single url for each product and can keep your category structures intact.
This is a situation that many eCommerce platforms really don't handle well. For example, I know of one that claims to offer canonical for product pages, but it gives each version (boxes/product.html and circles/product.html) its own unique canonical tag rather than both referring to the same product.html page. Kind of misses the point.
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
-
Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below. This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
-If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
-Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
-I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase? Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York |0 -
Rel Canonical for HTTP and HTTPS pages
My website has a login that has HTTPS pages. If the visitors doesn't log in they are given an HTTP page that is similar, but slightly different. Should I sure a Rel Canonical for these similar pages and how should that be set up? HTTP to HTTPS version or the other way around? Thank you, Joey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoeyGedgaud1 -
301 redirect for page 2, page 3 etc of an article or feed
Hey guys, We're looking to move a blog feed we have to a new static URL page. We are using 301 redirects but I'm unsure of what to regarding page 2, page 3 etc. of the feed. How do I make sure those urls are being redirected as well? For example: Moving FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/ to a new page url FloridaDentist.com/dental-tips. So, we are using a 301 on that old url to the new one. My questions is what to do with the other pages like FloridaDentist.com/blog/dental-tips/page/3. How do we make sure that page is also 301'd to the new main url?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page
Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Is it best to condense 2 similar category pages?
After reading Rand's great article about building Seo focused pages to serve topics, not keywords (http://moz.com/blog/topics-people-over-keywords-rankings-whiteboard-friday ) I started looking at my site. Question: I have 2 very similar category pages, orginally built to go after similar but different keyword terms. For example, one is: domain.com/blue-rings.html and the other is domain.com/blue-bands.com. (bridal jewelry) "Blue" is just a hypothetical type. At one time I could rank for "blue-rings" and "blue-bands". But with google changes, I think it's better to focus on a general term, right? Not set up similar pages, with same product, for very similar keywords. I'm thinking that having these 2 pages could be actually hurting, as they are competing with each other. Any recommendations? Thanks folks! Ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Canonical Tags?
I read that Google will "honor" these tags if your website has two url's with duplicate content. The duplicate content does not show up in my SEOmoz crawls report but they do in the search engines and many of "non authoritative links" that are generated from my search feature j(ugly url's with % ...not real user friendly) are ranking higher than the "good URL" links. So if I do the canonical tags I guess my higher ranking bad urls will drop. I even read that google might even completely overlook the links. I read somewhere that the best way to do this is with a 301 redirect...is that correct? I m ranking pretty good with my main keyword terms so I am afraid to make changes not knowing the effect. Any suggestions? Thanks, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
How would you handle 12,000 "tag" pages on Wordpress site?
We have a Wordpress site where /tag/ pages were not set to "noindex" and they are driving 25% of site's traffic (roughly 100,000 visits year to date). We can't simply "noindex" them all now, or we'll lose a massive amount of traffic. We can't possibly write unique descriptions for all of them. We can't just do nothing or a Panda update will come by and ding us for duplicate content one day (surprised it hasn't already). What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak1 -
I am working SEO on a website that has 2 pages for different variations of a keyword.
I have run into a situation where a website has 2 pages for different variations of a keyword. I personally like to use 1 page and make it powerful for a variety of variations of that keyword. Unfortunately for the site I’m working on, using only one page is not an option. Here is an example: They have a page for “Alex Miley Cameras” and then they have a page for “Alex Miley Cell Phones”. On the first one they want to rank for Alex Miley & Alex Miley Cameras. For the 2<sup>nd</sup> they want to rank for “Alex Miley Cell Phones”. My concern is will Google be indecisive on which page to rank for the keyword “Alex Miley” since they both contain this word. Also, will it affect any of the other words and spread the juice making each page weaker. I would appreciate advice on how to rank these pages each separately for their keywords and not have to worry about any confusion from Google. I can’t change the structure of the site. I only have access to the Meta info and page content. Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOPresident0
