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.
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
-
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes
I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color),
Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL
My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
-
If the canonical page disappears when it's out of stock, the user will get a 404 error when they try to access that URL. You'll need to canonicalize duplicates to a generic product or category page that won't disappear when the product is out of stock. Furthermore, if a product goes out of stock and you'll have more in stock later, it's best (for SEO purposes) to leave the page with an "out of stock" notice rather than remove it completely from the website.
-
I have a similar query. However in my case if the out of stock item is discontinued the page is removed but available product variations may remain.
What happens in the case where my canonical is out of stock and the page removed but other product variations are available?
Thanks,
-
To my knowledge, the behavior of the googlebot is not influenced by whether or not the product is out of stock. Is the page still accessible when the product is out of stock, or does it not display at all?
If the product page remains with an "out of stock" message, that's what users from search will see. If the product page becomes inaccessible when it goes out of stock temporarily, users from search will likely see a 404 page.
You may want to canonicalize to a higher level category page rather than one of the product variation pages. That way, it won't be an issue if one product variation goes out of stock.
May I ask which ecommerce software you are using?
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
-
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Rel=Canonical For Landing Pages
We have PPC landing pages that are also ranking in organic search. We've decided to create new landing pages that have been improved to rank better in natural search. The PPC team however wants to use their original landing pages so we are unable to 301 these pages to the new pages being created. We need to block the old PPC pages from search. Any idea if we can use rel=canonical? The difference between old PPC page and new landing page is much more content to support keyword targeting and provide value to users. Google says it's OK to use rel=canonical if pages are similar but not sure if this applies to us. The old PPC pages have 1 paragraph of content followed by featured products for sale. The new pages have 4-5 paragraphs of content and many more products for sale. The other option would be to add meta noindex to the old PPC landing pages. Curious as to what you guys think. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Duplicate Content on a Page Due to Responsive Version
What are the implications if a web designer codes the content of the site twice into the page in order to make the site responsive? I can't add the url I'm afraid but the H1 and the content appear twice in the code in order to produce both a responsive version and a desktop version. This is a Wordpress site. Is Google clever enough to distinguish between the 2 versions and treat them individually? Or will Google really think that the content has been repeated on the same page?
Technical SEO | | Wagada0 -
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
How to change the woocommerce product page permalink
Sorry Posting it again. How I can change the product URL structure. Please let me know how to fix woocommerce permalink in wordpress. My current URL is http://www.ayurjeewan.com/product/divya-ashmarihar-kwath and I want to like (only post name) http://www.ayurjeewan.com/divya-ashmarihar-kwath Attached is the screenshot of option available. qa2hZMP.jpg
Technical SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
How do I handle duplicate content of the same product in Multiple product categories?
I am building a BigCommerce store for selling framed art. Many of the pieces of art will fall in more than one product category. Let's say I have a framed print of a photograph of a western landscape. This piece of art would fit into these categories; "western", "landscape", and "photography". I would have three pages with duplicate content for just this one framed print. Will google give me less page rank due to this? Can all the link juice be given to just one of the three categories by use of rel=canonical? If so, does anyone know how to do this for a bigcommerce site? I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks, Kelly
Technical SEO | | Kelly_S0 -
How to prevent duplicate content at a calendar page
Hi, I've a calender page which changes every day. The main url is
Technical SEO | | GeorgFranz
/calendar For every day, there is another url: /calendar/2012/09/12
/calendar/2012/09/13
/calendar/2012/09/14 So, if the 13th september arrives, the content of the page
/calendar/2012/09/13
will be shown at
/calendar So, it's duplicate content. What to do in this situation? a) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 301? (but the redirect changes the day after to /calendar/2012/09/14) b) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 302 (but I will loose the link juice of /calendar?) c) Add a canonical tag at /calendar (which leads to /calendar/2012/09/13) - but I will loose the power of /calendar (?) - and it will change every day... Any ideas or other suggestions? Best wishes, Georg.0 -
Same Video on Multiple Pages and Sites... Duplicate Issues?
We're rolling out quite a bit of pro video and hosting on a 3-party platform/player (likely BrightCove) that also allows us to have the URL reside on our domain. Here is a scenario for a particular video asset: A. It's on a product page that the video is relevant for. B. We have an entry on our blog with the video C. We have a separate section of our site "Video Library" that provides a centralized view of all videos. It's there too. D. We eventually give the video to other sites (bloggers, industry educational sites etc) for outreach and link-building. A through C on our domain are all for user experience as every page is very relevant, but are there any duplicate video issues here? We would likely only have the transcript on the product page (though we're open to suggestions). Any related feedback would be appreciated. We want to make this scalable and done properly from the beginning (will be rolling out 1000+ videos in 2010)
Technical SEO | | SEOPA0