Another E-commerce Canonical Question
-
Hi guys,
Quick question: one of our clients has an e-commerce site with a very poor canonical tag setup and thousands of pages of duplicate content.
Let's use this as an example:
BRAND > Category > Type > Color
Four separate pages/URLs.The BRAND page lists all products.
The Category page lists all BRAND products for that category.
The Type page lists all BRAND products of a specific type in that category.
The Color page lists all BRAND products of a specific type in that category of a specific color.Anyway, these generate four separate URLs:
/BRAND
/BRAND/Category
/BRAND/Category-Type
/BRAND/Category-Type-ColorAvoiding duplicate content and product listings, I would appreciate your proposed canonicalization strategy/feedback.
-
Thank you for your reply, Alan.
To confirm, the pages I listed in my initial post have nothing but product listings on each of them. Some pages have only a few products. The client already has a self-referencing canonical tag on each of those pages, but is asking about canonicalizing everything to /BRAND
Any additional feedback would be helpful.
Thank you.
-
I would not worry, if they are are duplicate content, then google will rank one above the others. duplcate content is not penalty, thin content can be a problem, where you have a majority of your site as the same page, with minor changes. but what you put forward should not be a problem.
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
-
301s Or Stick With Canonical?
Hello all! A nice interesting one for you on this fine Friday... I have some pages which are accessible by 2 different urls - This is for user experience allowing the user to get to these pages in two different ways. To keep Google happy we have a rel canonical so that Google only sees one of these urls to avoid duplicates. After some SEO work I need to change both of these urls (on around 1,000 pages). Is the best way to do this... To 301 every old url to every new url Or... To not worry as I will just point the indexed pages to the new rel canonical? Any ideas or suggestions would be brilliant. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Http to https question (SSL)
Hi, I recently made two big changes to a site - www.aerlawgroup.com (not smart, I know). First, I changed from Weebly to Wordpress (WP Engine hosting with CDN + Cloudflare - is that overkill?) and I added SSL (http to https). From a technical perspective, I think I made a better site: (1) blazing fast, (2) mobile responsive, (3) more secure. I'm seeing the rankings fluctuate quite a bit, especially on the important keywords. I added SSL to my other sites, and saw no rankings change (they actually all went up slightly). I'm wondering if anyone has had experience going to SSL and can give me feedback on something I might have overlooked. Again, it's strange that all the other sites responded positively, but the one listed above is going in the opposite direction. Maybe there are other problems, and the SSL is just a coincidence. Any feedback would be appreciated. I followed this guide: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl - which helped tremendously (FYI).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
E Commerce site - removing discontinued items
We have been hit with a Panda penalty and the site has slowly been losing rankings since January, I've now realised that we have 4000+ page indexed in Google, but only 2000 live products. We have never deleted any of the pages with discontinued items, most of which were created when keyword stuffing and thin content reigned supreme - which explains the Panda penalty. But which is the best and quickest way to delete them from Google? We have already implemented a 'noindex' across all these pages, but as they are no longer in the 'crawlable' site, how will Google find them to know this? Would a 404 work any better - I'm not concerned about any link juice etc to/from these pages, I just want rid. I'm not sure if we can move all these pages into a dedicated directory which would allow us to use Google's Removal Tool - using it with the individual urls would be a mammoth task. Any advice would be most greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ElaineAllkids0 -
Redirection question
How would I redirect this URL: http://www.members.mysite.com/ to this URL: http://www.mysite.com/ ? I cant figure it out
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Permalink question
For 5 years I have used the permalink custom structure: /%postname% without the end backslash. I didn't think the difference was that big of a deal, yet last month I was curious of what benefits would happen if I made the change. To my surprise my rankings took a slight dive, but recovered stronger than before. As the URL itself doesn't require a redirect the posts and pages loaded the same with or wothout the "/" But now in Open Site Explorer, all my URL's have no page Authority. All the links i built were pointing to links without the backslash: example.com/post-name Questions: Did Google figure out the change, hence the dip in rankings and strong return? Will keeping /%postname%/ even though many links are pointing to a non backslash URL comeback to haunt me? Is there anything I can do to help lead Google to better see the changes I've made? thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikePatch0 -
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 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Canonical Tags & Search Bots
Does anyone know for sure if search engine bots still crawl links on a page whose canonical tags are set to a different page? So in short, would it be similar to a no-index follow? Thanks! -Margarita
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0