Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
E-commerce site, one product multiple categories best practice
-
Hi there,
We have an e-commerce shopping site with over 8000 products and over 100 categories.
Some sub categories belong to multiple categories - for example, A Christmas trees can be under "Gardening > Plants > Trees" and under "Gifts > Holidays > Christmas > Trees"
The product itself (example: Scandinavian Xmas Tree) can naturally belong to both these categories as well.
Naturally these two (or more) categories have different breadcrumbs, different navigation bars, etc. From an SEO point of view, to avoid duplicate content issues, I see the following options:
- Use the same URL and change the content of the page (breadcrumbs and menus) based on the referral path. Kind of cloaking.
- Use the same URL and display only one "main" version of breadcrumbs and menus. Possibly add the other "not main" categories as links to the category / product page.
- Use a different URL based on where we came from and do nothing (will create essentially the same content on different urls except breadcrumbs and menus - there's a possibiliy to change the category text and page title as well)
- Use a different URL based on where we came from with different menus and breadcrumbs and use rel=canonical that points to the "main" category / product pages
This is a very interesting issue and I would love to hear what you guys think as we are finalizing plans for a new website and would like to get the most out of it.
Thank you all!
-
Hi,
This topic is quite old, but is still relevant.
I understand that the solution mentioned above is the most thorough one.
But is there something wrong with just using canonicals? In a webshop that we are managing, there are just a couple of subcategories that belong to different categories. An example:
Only these two URL's will generate duplicate content, since the categories above 'Company law' ('Economic law' and 'Companies') clearly have different content. Can't you just pick one version as the canonical one? Since we have just a couple of these categories, this is an easier solution.
Thanks for your feedback guys!
-
Thought I'd answer my own question!! (with the help of Dr Pete, who answered this question in private Q&A)
"The multiple path issue is tough - you can't really have a path visitors can follow and then hide that from Google (or, at least, it's not a good idea). You could NOINDEX certain paths, but that's a complex consideration (it has pros and cons and depends a lot on your goals and site architecture).
If you generate the breadcrumb path via user activity and store it in a session/cookie, that's generally ok. Google's crawlers, as well as any visitor who came to the site via search, would see a default breadcrumb, but visitors would see a breadcrumb based on their own activity. That's fine, since the default is the same for humans as for spiders."
That seems to be a fairly conclusive answer IMO.
-
Hi Arik,
I'd really like an answer to this aswell, as there seems to be no clear answer online.
My understanding is that a breadcrumb should specify a canonical crawl path (not based on referral path), so option 1 is out
option 2 seems suboptimal and not something I can recall seeing implemented on other sites
options 3 and 4: I don't want multiple URLs and to use rel=canonical as I already have one definitive URL.
This seems like it must be a fairly regular problem people have, but cant see a good solution online anywhere
Help anyone?
-
Dear All,
I repeat about Option 1: Use the same URL and change the content of the page (breadcrumbs and menus) based on the referral path. Kind of cloaking.
Changing content based on the referral path means that the same url will have different content at times. Which means that the search engine will probably find a different content on the page than some other views of the page. As far as I know, this is cloaking - please correct me if I'm wrong.
Option 4 will not necessarily achieve the desired effect as the search engine might decide to ignore the tag. i checked a few examples that this is actually what happens when other e-commerce stores use canonical - you find both URLs in the serps. So I doubt this is the perfect solution...
I'm still not convinced that I have a definitive answer for this. Anyone?
Thanks!
-
Option 1 is not cloaking - it is displaying content dynamically. Cloaking would be if you showed one page to viewers and a different version to Googlebot.
I would say it depends on how different pages are. If all that changes in the breadcrumbs, they I would say you're fine with options 1, 2, or 4.
If the pages are significantly different, such as different category names, page titles, descriptive text, etc. I would go with option 4.
-
Thanks Adam.
I very much respect your opinion and even agree that from a user's point of view option 1 is the best.
I wonder though - it's this considered as cloaking?
|
|
From:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.
Some examples of cloaking include:
[...]
Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor|
|
This becomes more complicated, as the path the user chose to get to the specific subcategory or product page reflects not only on the breadcrumbs but also on the category's navigation menu and possibly the descriptive text of the category.
What's your take on this?
-
Options 1, 2, or 4 should be fine. Option 3 is not recommended.
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
-
Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?
Hey there! My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try. The site URL is: https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/ However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site. https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/ And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially. I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work. Any insight would be immensely helpful. Thanks! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages
The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan0 -
When is Too Many Categories Too Many on a eCommerce site?
We all know that more and more people are increasing the amount of different categories that eCommerce sites have. Say for example, you have over 3,000 different products, all categories contain unique text at the top of each, all of the categories link to each other (so loads on internal linking) and no two categories contain the exact same products. My question is this, is there ever a stage that you could create too many categories? Alternatively, do you think you should just keep creating categories based on what our customers search for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films1 -
What are the best practices for geo-targeting by sub-folders?
My domain is currently targeting the US, but I'm building out sub-folders that will need to geo-target France, England, and Spain. Each country will have it's own sub-folder, and professionally translated (domain.com/france). Other than the hreflang tags, what are other best practices I can implement? Can Google Webmaster tools geo-target by subfolder? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks Justin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rhythm_Agency0 -
[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)
Hello, We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content. What we have done so far: Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product") Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL) In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do? Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change) Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyLounge0 -
Using WP All Import csv import plugin for wordpress to daily update products on large ecommerce site. Category naming and other issues.
We have just got an automated solution working to upload about 4000 products daily to our site. We get a CSV file from the wholesalers server each day and the way they have named products and categories is not ideal. Although most of the products remain the same (don't need to be over written) Some will go out of stock or prices may change etc. Problem is we have no control over the csv file so we need to keep the catagories they have given us. Might be able to create new catgories and have products listed under multiple categories? If anyone has used wp all import or has knoledge in this area please let me know. I have plenty more questions but this should start the ball rolling! Thanks in advance mozzers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weebro0 -
Multiple Domain names pointing at one website
Hello, A collegue has asked if we can buy multiple domain names which contain keywords and point them at our website. Is this good practise or will it be seen as spam? Will these domains actually get ranked? I'm sure I'm not the first person to raise this but can't seem to find any questions and answers about this. Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist scude@sierratradingpost.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0