Ah cool! I am glad it has worked out.

I am not 100% sure, but I think with this case you could only use the product page itself.

I need to digg into this a littlebit more before giving you an accurate answer.

Hi Tom,

I would only change the picture and the price (if applicable). The text could also change is some proportion (for example the size description, color description, etc).

Gr.,

Istvan

Hi Tom,

What I would do is that I would use the same url and different parameter for the SKU-s.

I will point out an example:

www.example.com/cat/t-shirt.html?sku=skunumber

on the product page you would have a canonical link to: www.example.com/cat/t-shirt.html

I hope that helped,

Istvan

Hey Jesper,

The decision of URL structure can be affected by multiple stuff, that your Content Management System supports or not.

I prefer the 3rd version (the one without category in the link) to avoid duplicate content coming from different URL patterns to the same page (now I know you could place canonical links, but what happens when you have 50000 products and at least 10000 categories and child categories?).

If you do not have too many categories and subcategories, and you are able to insert canonical links into your system, then I would go for URL structure with category name included (it is more descriptive).

Just an example for your case:

A. Website with a lot of categories and subcategories

www.example.com/panasonic/lumix/lumix-FZ200.html

www.example.com/digital-cameras/panasonic/lumx-FZ200.html

www.example/product/luxim-FZ200.html

and so on...

Could leave to duplicate content if you cannot point out which version of the URL is the "Real" version.

B. Website would have the same product under the same categories, but then the product URL would look like:

www.example/luxim-FZ200.html

I hope that helps you take a decision.

Gr.,

Istvan

Hey,

Any news on how it went? I am curious if that was the problem or not.

Gr.,

Istvan

Hey,

Maybe this helps you a littlebit: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes

Dr. Pete's article explains well how the status codes work.

Gr.,

Istvan

Hey there!

I think I have found what your problem is with you canonical link

In your code you have:

And probably you are somewhere forcing the URls to have a / at the end.

So basically you are confusing browsers and search engine bots, because they now cannot tell which is the real version:

SE enters the page. Then it sees that the right version should be the one WITHOUT a "/" at the end, then that pages has a 301 redirect to the version which HAS a "/" at the end of the URL (but that has a canonical which points out that the preffered version should be ). So it is a non-ending circle.

So if you add a / to the end of your URl, your problem should be solved.

Final thought: Screaming Frog is working well.

I hope this was a solution.

Cheers,

Istvan

With canonical tag it is a one way road:

You have Page A and Page B with the same content but you want to point out Page A

Page B has a canonical to Page A:

Page B will disappear from the Search Results transferring all the link juice that it has gained to Page A

If you have the same content in different languages then you should use hreflang telling search engines that the two are the same but in other language:

Page A and Page B will have both the following in their headers

This way you will not Geo-Target but Language-Target the two pages ;-)

Sorry for responding late, but I somehow forgot to answer this one.

So basically I would consider putting HREFLANG to all of the pages (US, original and any other language). Please note that HREFLANG is connected to optimizing the same content on different languages and not for geo-targeting mainly.

The best example would be Belgium.  You can have content in French and in Dutch, still you are optimizing for the same region.

Hi danarchism,

This is what we have on a quite big website:

1. Main site is geo-targeted for a specific country

2. sub-folders of the site are geo-targeted for other countries

3. On each Page in the header we have the HREFLANG to the other 9 languages we use on the site.

Still when we talk about SERP impressions we have many times overlays (Such as the Geo-Targeted content to the Netherlands will appear in the Google.be or Geo-Targeted content to Germany appears in Google.At).

I hope this helped,

Istvan

Sorry I do not have much. Basically I believe Google is running all kind of different tests on each database, collecting data then using it on major updates.

One possible way to check rankings for different databases is to connect through Proxy Servers, but I am not a big IT guy, so maybe someone else can answer you how to do that.

Istvan

Hey Pyxle,

There are a lot of Google Databases all over the world. Depending on your browser location your query will differ depending on which Google Database you are connected to (Giving different results).

Google does test-test-test on each database, so there are a lot of factors that could differ from database to database.

I hope this helped,

Istvan