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
-
Sitemaps: Best Practice
What should and what shouldn't go in the sitemap? In particular, pages like subscribe to our newsletter/ unsubscribe to our newsletter? Is there really any benefit in highlighting those pages to the SEs? Thanks for any advice/ anecdotes 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below. This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
-If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
-Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
-I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase? Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York |0 -
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Focusing on Multiple Niches for one site: good or bad?
Is it wise to focus on multiple niches for one site, rather than zoning in one or two different niches? On one hand, you can target many more topics and go after tons of keywords, but on the other hand doesn't google get confused of what your site is really about? Won't google just focus on one of the niches that you provide more than all others? Any input would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?
We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site. Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category. This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product. So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content? Is this the best way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spiralsites0 -
Magento: URLs for Products in Multiple Categories
I am working in Magento to build out a large e-commerce site with several thousand products. It's a great platform, but I have run into the issue of what it does to URLs when you put a product into multiple categories. Basically, "a book" in two categories would make two URLs for one product: 1) /books/a-book 2) author-name/a-book So, I need to come up with a solution for this. It seems I have two options: Found this from a Magento SEO article: 'Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL's. Because Magento doesn't support this functionality very well - it creates duplicate content issues - it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set "Use categories path for product URL's to "no".' This would solve the issues and be a quick fix, but I think it's a double edged sword, because then we lose the SEO value of our well named categories being in the URL. Use Canonical tags. To be fair, I'm not even sure this is possible. Even though it is creating different URLs and, thus, poses a risk of "duplicate content" being crawled, there really is only one page on the admin side. So, I can't go to all of the "duplicate" pages and put a canonical tag, because those duplicate pages don't really exist on the back-end. Does that make sense? After typing this out, it seems like the best thing to do probably will be to just turn off categories in the URL from the admin side. However, I'd still love any input from the community on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1 -
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0