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 tag use for ecommerce product page detail
-
Hi,
I have a category page I want to rank. This page has 24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same.
I want to use canonical tag in any product to the parent category.
Is this a right use of the canonical?
Category page I'm talking about is : Finger bitsIf I understand how to use canonical tags I can improve all my category pages.
thanks
marco
-
Hii,
The canonical tag plays a vital role in optimizing eCommerce product page details, helping to prevent duplicate content issues and enhance SEO performance.
-
Ok, thank you. now it's clear and it makes sense

take care
marco -
Even though your product titles have lower search volume, you still want to use your product detail pages as the preferred ranking URL for any product-specific query. This is where the benefit of long-tail keywords comes into play, you'll get a lot less traffic from them, but the quality (likelihood of them converting/purchasing) is much higher.
Take the 'Nicolai – 8th Wonder finger bit – Granite' for example. If I've done a Google search for that, my research is already done and I know exactly what I need. If I click on a result that takes me to a category page, that's not going to be as useful to me. But if the search result is for the product detail page, I'm landing on the exact page I want. It's got all the product info & specs I need, pricing, and most importantly, an Add to Cart button.
Hope that's helpful. For more info on ecomm SEO, I'd recommend taking a look at back through some of the Moz posts on the subject: https://moz.com/blog/category/e-commerce
-
Hi Logan,
thank you for your answer.
I will follow your suggestion.But this is is really something I'm interesting in deeply understand.
If I have a category with many products
category1 with products' titles: cat1 p1, cat1 p2, cat1p3, cat1 p4,cat1 p5, cat1 p6..
category2 with products' titles: cat2 q1,cat2 q2,cat2 q3,cat2 q4,cat2 q5,cat2 q6,cat2 q7,cat2 q8,cat2 q9I know that 90% of searches are for the "category keywords" because specific product title is so specific that has low volume search.
I want to avoid that these product pages are all of low authority because rank for the same long term keyword that is exactly the category. With a big effort I can write different descriptions but they will rank anyway all the the big hat keyword as well. isn't it.
I think this is one of the most common SEO issue for e-shops.
Any resources where I can learn more?
ciao -
Marco,
Do not proceed with that task, it is not the proper way to use a canonical tag. If you put a canonical tag pointing a product to a category page, the product URL will eventually get removed from the index and therefore won't drive any traffic for product-specific queries.
You mentioned "24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same", is Moz flagging them as duplicates? If so, I'd recommend differentiating these products more. You could write more robust descriptions or add user-generated content such as reviews or Q&A.
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks1 -
Safety Data Sheet PDFs are Showing Higher in Search Results than Product Pages
I have a client who just launched an updated website that has WooCommerce added to it. The website also has a page of Safety Data Sheets that are PDFs that contain information about some of the products. When we do a Google search for many of the products the Safety Data Sheets show up first in the search results instead of the product pages. Has anyone had this happen and know how to solve the issue?
Technical SEO | | teamodea0 -
Reviews on Product Page or Separated
Good Afternoon We currently have our individual product information pages set-up with a link through to a separate review page optimised for the term "Product A Reviews" I was reading about structured data and if I read correctly, the reviews should sit with the marked up product data so I was wondering whether to merge them back into one page. We have many reviews so the review pages are paginated in blocks of 25 My options are: Leave as it is, product info page and separate review page Merge the review content back in to the main page and have the pagination work on that page Include the first 25 reviews on the product info page then when user clicks through to page 2, 3 etc they're taken to the separated review page. In that way the product page would regularly get new content and we can still have a page specifically targeted for reviews. From the users point of view, they probably aren't even aware they're being taken to a separate reviews page so with that in mind as I'm typing this maybe they should be one page again
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
Do you need a canonical tag for search and filter pages?
Hi Moz Community, We've been implementing new canonical tags for our category pages but I have a question about pages that are found via search and our filtering options. Would we still need a canonical tag for pages that show up in search + a filter option if it only lists one page of items? Example below. www.uncommongoods.com/search.html/find/?q=dog&exclusive=1 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Multiple H1 Tags on Page
Can having multiple H1 tags on a webpage be detrimental to its rankings?
Technical SEO | | AubbiefromAubenRealty0 -
Is it ok to use H1 tags in breadcrumbs?
A client has an e-commerce site and she doesn't want a page title on the products page. She has breadcrumbs though. Her website developer suggests putting the H1 on the breadcrumbs. So: products> Gifts > picture frame with h1 tags round the word "picture frame". Is this ok to do? Or is it a bad thing for SEO purposes? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
How to create site map for large site (ecommerce type) that has 1000's if not 100,000 of pages.
I know this is kind of a newbie question but I am having an amazing amount of trouble creating a sitemap for our site Bestride.com. We just did a complete redesign (look and feel, functionality, the works) and now I am trying to create a site map. Most of the generators I have used "break" after reaching some number of pages. I am at a loss as to how to create the sitemap. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | BestRide0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230