It's certainly beneficial to link to wherever is going to help the user navigate. However, I would be hesitant to put actual links to higher branches in this case because it's likely that the visitor path has already been there and for them to navigate away from the product page would only deter them further to completing your checkout process.

If your current site architecture (read: nav bar in this case) doesn't already link out to the category/subcategory page, then yes, it may help slightly with internal linking "juice", but it will likely be negligible, and you could/should compensate this with things like XML sitemaps anyway.

Another thing to consider would be the opportunity to cross/upsell to other products. It's fairly easy - depending on the CMS you're using - to build in a widget or some kind of functionality to help cross promote products on product pages. I mention this because it's a great alternative to giving people the option to click away from something they probably know they already want, as well as allowing you to increase your price per order by making it easier for them to add "related products" to their shopping cart.

Not knowing your exact situation, I would advise making the internal linking structure whatever is best for the path of the visitor. Make up any internal linking benefit that you think you might be missing by making sure you're XML sitemaps are in order, as well as interlinking wherever necessary in other parts of your site.

Hope that helps!

Related resources:
https://moz.com/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
http://www.screenpages.com/about/articles/ecommerce-navigation

It sounds like first you would need to know how the other states are using their sites (folders). This will help you answer the canonical vs. unique content question.

For example, if the individual states are going put their own marketing efforts behind their piece of the site, you definitely don't want to canonical their section as power would be transferred away. However, if they're not actively marketing their section (building links, blogging, whatever), AND your client doesn't mind the individual states not having a lot of ranking power, then I'd say using canonicals within each section is a viable option.

Let's assume that for whatever reason you can't use canonicals. Then it seems like you can either 1) suggest some type of plan for the states to start building out their own content in their areas so content is more unique all the way around, or 2) have the association (or you) do it themselves. Regardless, there's elbow grease involved.

Hi Lise,

Generally this isn't something you should do unless you just made the page and you want to change it (as in the case of a misspelling in the URL, for example). Like Andy mentioned, you're essentially just creating another page from scratch.

I'd also suggest creating a 301 redirect from the old page to the new one. This way any link equity remains intact.

Here's a good Moz post on this topic: https://moz.com/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

Hi,

I wouldn't worry too much about this. It's not ideal to have so many duplicates (especially if they're on the same page), which is probably why this is getting tripped in the audit tools, but it's not something I would lose sleep about. At the end of the day, headings are for structuring content for the user, so if it makes sense, do it.

It's mostly about multiple headers on the same page, but here's Matt Cutts describing what's good/bad about this practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM

Hope that helps!