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Ok that's exactly what I was wondering. I'm not worried about link juice at all. I'm worried if Google's algorithm will flag me because all of a sudden we have these broken (although canocalized) URLs

I have an ecommerce site with many different URLs with the same product. Let's say the product is a hat. It's in:

a

a) mysite.com/products/hat

b) mysite.com/collections/head-ware/hat

c) mysite.com/collections/stuff-to-wear-on-your-head/hat

Right now, A is the canonical page for B and C.

I want to clean up my site, so that every product only has ONE unique URL, which is linked to from all the collections. So B and C URL will be broken. Is it necessary that I 301 them if they were already canonical'd?

Based on the number of products I have, I would have to 301 1000+ URLs. I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do to avoid getting penalized.

thanks

Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors.

I have two routes I could take:

a) Make 50 separate product pages

Pros:

-Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats.

-Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat).

Cons:

-Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color)

b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants

Pros:

-More elegant and organized

-NO duplicate Content

Cons:

-Losing out on color specific search terms

-Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions.

Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?

Say we have a white-widget that is in our white widget collection and also in our wedding widget collection. Currently, we have 3 different URLs for that product (white-widgets/white-widget and wedding-widgets/white-widget and all-widgets/white-widget).We are automatically generating a rel=canonical tag for those individual collection product pages that canonical the original product page (/all-widgets/white-widget). This guide says that is the structure Zappos uses and says "There is an elegance to this approach. However, I would re-visit it today in light of changes in the SEO world."
I noticed that Zappos, and many other shops now actually just link back to the parent product page (e.g. If I am in wedding widget section and click on the widget, I go to all-products/white-widget instead of wedding-widgets/white-widget).So my question is:Should we even have these individual product URLs or just get rid of them altogether? My original thought was that it would help SEO for search term "white wedding widget" to have a product URL wedding-widget/white-widget but we won't even be taking advantage of that by using rel=canonical anyway.