Should "View All Products" be the canonical page?
-
We currently have "view 12" as the default setting when someone arrives to www.mysite.com/subcategory-page.aspx. We have been advised to change the default to "view all products" and make that the canonical page to ensure all of our products get indexed. My concern is that doing this will increase the page load time and possibly hurt rankings. Does it make sense to change all our our subcategory pages to show all the products when someone visits the page? Most sites seem to have a smaller number of products as the default.
-
Google just announced some tags to help support pagination better. They say if you have a view all option that doesn't take too long to load, searchers generally prefer that, so you can rel=canonical to that page. However, if you don't have a view all page, then you can put these nifty rel="next" and rel="prev" tags in to let Google know your page has pagination, and where the next and previous pages are.
It sounds like you don't want to go the view all route, so you should read the second post below and you can implement the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags.
(from the view all post below) However, if you strongly desire your view-all page not to appear in search results: 1) make sure the component pages in the series don’t include rel=”canonical” to the view-all page, and 2) mark the view-all page as “noindex” using any of the standard methods.
View all: http://googlewebmastercentral.blo...
next/prev: http://googlewebmastercentral.blo...
-
I wouldn't show all products as a default page for users, as that doesn't sound like a good user experience.
Here are a few other Q&A entries from people with similar questions. They endorse some different solutions to the problem:
-
Thanks Anthony and John.
Currently, www.mysite.com/subcategory-page.aspx shows 12 products. When I select "view 24" it adds the following to the end of the URL: "?P=1&S=G&Sh=24&Sr=1"
We have added the rel="canonical" tag to the all of the pages to direct all of the link juice to the default page and to avoid duplicate content issues and have added the parameters to Google WMT. Wouldn't changing our default page to show all the products for indexing purposes be faster than trying to developing links to all of the "hidden" product pages?
-
It sounds like the changes are in the URL parameters and their values. Now in Google Webmaster Tools, if you go to the Site configuration > URL parameters page, you can tell Google how different parameters affect the page.
-
In my experience, use of rel="canonical" is more related to consolidating external link juice. If you're concerned with getting all of your products indexed, focus on creating a good XML sitemap and verifying it in Google Webmaster Tools, and finding ways to create both internal and external links to your deep URLs. I would make the canonical page the one that you want to send visitors to.
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
-
SEO impact of mouse over text on product page
Hi, we recently improved our product page to show more color options, like this http://www.prams.net/knorr-baby-voletto-sport-pram-stroller-reversible-seat-green-a?inref=home-left In order to improve the seo, we expanded our rich snippets the following way we added all color options, skus and prices as "items offered" we are showing the highest and lowest price range and eliminated the base price https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ Google now shows the price range in the rich snippet. The questions is: as the user see the original color, the price and the sku only when mousing over the small images. We are worried that this could be treated a "hidden text". Does anybody have experience in this matter or a way a to solve it better? Thanks in advance Dieter 8WthtQY
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
Value in adding rel=next prev when page 2-n are "noindex, follow"?
Category A spans over 20 pages (not possible to create a "view all" because page would get too long). So I have page 1 - 20. Page 1 has unique content whereas page 2-20 of the series does not. I have "noindex, follow" on page 2-20. I also have rel=next prev on the series. Question: Since page 2-20 is "noindex, follow" doesn't that defeat the purpose of rel=next prev? Don't I run the risk of Google thinking "hmmm….this is odd. This website has noindexed page 2-20, yet using rel=next prev." Even though I do not run the risk, what is my upset in keeping rel=next prev when, again, the pages 2-20 are noindex, follow. thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Site appears with ".com" but not without it
Hi, When I search for my site www.docslinc.com as "docslinc.com" the results on the SERPS have the home page and the site map but not the other indexed pages. The other issue occurs when I search for the company name alone "docslinc", the homepage does not show up at all, and some of the other pages show up. I have looked all over the place and cannot find an answer. I have checked the onsite optimization and it all seems to be correct. Any suggestions would be amazing. Thanks, zulumanf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zulumanf0 -
Huge e-commerce site migration - what to do with product pages?
My very large e-commerce client is about to undergo a site migration in which every product page URL will be changing. I am already planning my 301 redirect process for the top ~1,000 pages on the site (categories, products, and more) but this will not account for the more than 1,000 products on the site. The client specified that they don't want to implement much more than 1,000 redirects so as to avoid impacting site performance. What is the best way to handle these pages without causing hundreds of 404 errors on site migration day? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Should we show(to google) different city pages on our website which look like home page as one page or different? If yes then how?
On our website, we show events from different cities. We have made different URL's for each city like www.townscript.com/mumbai, www.townscript.com/delhi. But the page of all the cities looks similar, only the events change on those different city pages. Even our home URL www.townscript.com, shows the visitor the city which he visited last time on our website(initially we show everyone Mumbai, visitor needs to choose his city then) For every page visit, we save the last visited page of a particular IP address and next time when he visits our website www.townscript.com, we show him that city only which he visited last time. Now, we feel as the content of home page, and city pages is similar. Should we show these pages as one page i.e. Townscript.com to Google? Can we do that by rel="canonical" ? Please help me! As I think all of these pages are competing with each other.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchitmalik0 -
Product Descriptions for a product with many designs
I'm a newbie with SEO and I have a question regarding product descriptions. Let's say I am selling 100 dog id tags. The tags are all made of same materials, same size, just different designs. Now for the product description, do I need to write a different set of description for all 100 tags? This is an example of a short product description(there's more) for all the pet tags: Personalized with 4 lines of information and 20 characters in each line. Lifetime guarantee - If your pet ID tag ever becomes illegible, we will replace it free of charge. Solid one-piece construction - No glued or ""sandwiched"" materials to wear out or fall apart. Split ring for collar attachement included with EVERY tag. Countless uses - School backpacks, luggage, fashion accessories, and many more! All of the above information pertains to all the pet tags. Can all my product descriptions contain that information, or will I need to modify this 100 times for each individual pet tag? I read up a lot on duplicate content so I am slightly confused. Will this hurt my SEO? Thanks, Keith
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ktw0160 -
Duplicate Page Title/Content Issues on Product Review Submission Pages
Hi Everyone, I'm very green to SEO. I have a Volusion-based storefront and recently decided to dedicate more time and effort into improving my online presence. Admittedly, I'm mostly a lurker in the Q&A forum but I couldn't find any pre-existing info regarding my situation. It could be out there. But again, I'm a noob... So, in my recent SEOmoz report I noticed that over 1,000 Duplicate Content Errors and Duplicate Page Title Errors have been found since my last crawl. I can see that every error is tied to a product in my inventory - specifically each product page has an option to write a review. It looks like the subsequent page where a visitor can fill out their review is the stem of the problem. All of my products are shown to have the same issue: Duplicate Page Title - Review:New Duplicate Page Content - the form is already partially filled out with the corresponding product My first question - It makes sense that a page containing a submission form would have the same title and content. But why is it being indexed, or crawled (or both for that matter) under every parameter in which it could be accessed (product A, B, C, etc)? My second question (an obvious one) - What can I do to begin to resolve this? As far as I know, I haven't touched this option included in Volusion other than to simply implement it. If I'm missing any key information, please point me in the right direction and I'll respond with any additional relevant information on my end. Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DakotahW0 -
Proper use and coding of rel = "canonical" tag
I'm working on a site that has pages for many wedding vendors. There are essentially 3 variations of the page for each vendor with only slightly different content, so they're showing up as "duplicate content" in my SEOmoz Campaign. Here's an example of the 3 variations: http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161 http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=messageWrite http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=writeReview Because of this, we placed a rel="canoncial" tag in the second 2 pages to try to fix the problem. However, the coding does not seem to validate in the w3 html validator. I can't say I understand html well enough to understand the error the validator is pointing out. We also added a the following to the second 2 types of pages <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> Am I employing this tag correctly in this case? Here is a snippet of the code below. <html> <head> <title>Reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MAtitle> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="[/includes/style.css](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/includes/style.css)"> <link href="[http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161)" rel="canonical" /> <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffreytrull1
<meta name="keywords" content="Astonishing Event, Inc, Somerset Massachusetts, Massachusetts Wedding Wedding Planners Directory, Massachusetts weddings, wedding Massachusetts ">
<meta name="description" content="Get information and read reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MA. Astonishing Event, Inc appears in the directory of Somerset MA wedding Wedding Planners on WeddingReportsMA.com."> <script src="[http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js](view-source:http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js)" type="text/javascript">script> <script type="text/javascript"> _uacct = "UA-173959-2"; urchinTracker(); script> head>0