E-commerce site, one product multiple categories best practice

[arikbar]

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:

1. Use the same URL and change the content of the page (breadcrumbs and menus) based on the referral path. Kind of cloaking.
2. 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.
3. 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)
4. 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!

[Mat_C]

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:

• example.com/legal/economic-law/company-law
• example.com/tax/companies/company-law

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!

[jamesjackson]

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.

[jamesjackson]

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?

[arikbar]

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!

[AdamThompson]

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.

[arikbar]

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?

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From: 
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355

Cloaking 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

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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?

[AdamThompson]

Options 1, 2, or 4 should be fine. Option 3 is not recommended.