Canonical on ecommerce pages
-
I have seen some competitors using the nofollow tag as well as canonical on all refinements and sorts on their ecommerce pages. Example being if you went to their hard drive category page and refined by 500gb hard drives then that page would have a canonical element to send it back to hard drives page without the refinement. I see how this could be good for control indexation and the amount pages Google crawls, but do you see problems in using the canonical tag this way?
Also I have seen competitors have category page descriptions (describing what that type of product is) on all pagenation and refinements (the exact same block of text on all of the pages). Would this be a duplicate content problem or is it not that big of a deal since the content is only on their site so they are only competiting with themselves.
Thanks for your help
-
In addition to Daniel's response, I'll offer that having the same description on every pagination version page is not helpful, though if there are enough unique products on each page, and each has a caption and or price, and you optimize each product thumbnail alt attribute, it's not necessarily a duplicate content thing as much an annoyance factor for some users.
Ideally it's best to have a unique description on every page, or only have the full text description on the default category page. Be sure however to append every page Title, URL and h1 with "Page X" as an additional way to communicate both the uniqueness of each page and for users to know where in the pagination sequence they are.
-
The canonical tag is precisely to avoid duplicate content issues. If each filter or refinement simply brings up a page of content with a similar block of text and similar display of products as another page, then they don't want them all indexed. Much easier to rel=canonical these pages to the main page so that Google only crawls and indexes one page, not several very, very similar versions of it.
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
-
Is it good practice to use hreflang on pages that have canonicals?
I have a page in English that has both English & Spanish translations on it. It is pulled in from a page generated on another site and I am not able to adjust the CSS to display only one language. Until I can fix this, I have made the English page the canonical for both. Do I still want to use hreflang for English & Spanish pages? What if I do not have a Spanish page at all. I assume (from what I've read) I should not have an hreflang on the English page. Is this correct? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Should search pages be indexed?
Hey guys, I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them? Appreciate any thoughts!
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Advice on improving ecommerce product detail pages to rank better in google search results.
Hi all, I run an ecommerce website, not a great ranked site, however i want to try and improve the product detail pages. To do this, i am first going to focus on 1 page (this one: http://goo.gl/eS62SU) If i type the product code directly into google.co.uk search i am on the 8th page (see https://www.google.co.uk/#q=hac-hfw2220r-z&start=70) which is a bit poor to say the least. I see this kind of thing for a lot of my products. Hence, i am going to see if over the next month or two i can get this one page moving up the rankings purely with on page optimisation. I would like to ask a couple of things: 1. Is there anything that jumps out at you as to why that product detail page could NOT ever rank well, i.e some code / set up of page etc that prevents google ranking it 2. Any advice you could give that might improve that page in rankings for its product code. FYI - I can not change the dynamic URL, I only have control over such things as product name / summary / features / spec etc any advice welcome
Technical SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
3 pages crawled?
For some reason, my account says it only crawled 3 pages this week, where its usually about 3K. This is my robots which shouldnt affect http://www.theprinterdepo.com/robots.txt and this is my site http://www.theprinterdepo.com any idea?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hello. My Seomoz report this week tells me that I have about 500 pages with Too Many On-Page Links One of the examples is this one: https://www.theprinterdepo.com/hp-9000mfp-refurbished-printer (104 links) If you check, all our products have a RELATED products section and in some of them the related products can be UP to 40 Products. I wonder how can I solve this. I thought that putting nofollow on the links of the related products might fix all of these warnings? Putting NOFOLLOW does not affect SEO?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Page MozRank and MozTrust 0 for Home Page, Makes No Sense?
Hey Mozzers! I'm a bit confused by a site that is showing a 0 for home page MozRank and MozTrust, while its subdomain and root domain metrics look decent (relatively). I am posting images of the page metrics and subdomain metrics to show the disparity: http://i.imgur.com/3i0jq.png http://i.imgur.com/ydfme.png Is it normal to see this type of disparity? The home page has very little inbound links, but the big goose egg has me wondering if there is something else going on. Has anyone else experienced this? Or, does anyone have speculation as to why a home page would have a 0 MozRank while the subdomain metrics look much better? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ClarityVentures0 -
Rel-canonical tag
Hi, I'm having some confusion with the rel-canonical tag. A few months ago we implemented the rel-canonical tag because we had many errors specifically duplicate page content come upon the SEOmoz web app (mostly because we use tracking code). I had asked what to do about this and was advised by the SEOmoz web app to implement the rel-canonical tag. However, when I'm working on the Keyword Optimizer Tool, it always checks off that I'm using the rel-canonical tag improperly, and then when I go into our sites' CMS for that page and uncheck "Use Canonical URL", the keyword optimizer tool up's my grade for that correction/that I've made an improvement. So my question is if the page I'm working on is the one I want search engines to find, should I not be using the Canonical URL tag? Should the Canonical URL tag only be used on URL's with the tracking code?
Technical SEO | | aircyclemegan0 -
Nofollow and ecommerce cart/checkout pages
Hi!! Another noob question: Should I be nofollowing my site's cart and checkout pages? Or as SEs can't get to the checkout pages without either logging in or completing the form is it something I shouldn't worry about? Have read things saying both. Not sure which is correct. Thank you! Appreciate the help. Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0