What is the best canonical url to use for a product page?
-
I just helped a client redesign and launch a new website for their organic skin care company (www.hylunia.com). The site is built in Magento which by default creates MANY urls for each product. Which of these two do you think would be the best to use as the canonical version?
http://www.hylunia.com/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution
or http://www.hylunia.com/products/face-care/facial-moisturizers/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution ?I'm leaning on the latter, because it makes sense to me to have the breadcrumbs match the url string, and also it seems having more keywords in the url would help. However, it's obviously a very long url, and there might be some benefits to using the shorter version that I'm not aware of.
Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts.
Best,
Daniel
-
I agree with Nakul - your best bet here is the name of the product right after the domain name - clean, short and straight to the point.
I find the canonical urls especially useful when you need the parameters in the url in order to provide some functionality such as highlight the link in the navigation etc., but it doesn't really have much impact on the way the product is displayed - in this case I always use the shortest possible version of the url as the canonical.
Later, when you create your sitemap, make sure that you also use the shortest versions to be included in it - so that you stay consistent with your decision and make it clear to the search engines what version should be indexed.
-
Based on what I see I would recommend you use this one: http://www.hylunia.com/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution Here are my reasons: 1. http://www.hylunia.com/products/face-care/facial-moisturizers/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution is way too long. 2. It 2 levels down in terms of folders. 3. You already have the category names in the Page Title as well as the Breadcrumbs, so you are not really missing out on the On-page by having the category names removed from the URL. That's just my 2c. I hope that helps.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Topical keywords for product pages and blogs
Hi all, I have a question regarding keywords. Of course we all know that keyword research should be focused on a certain topic and on user intent (and thus on answering specific questions) instead of trying to put keywords in a page to make it rank. However, duplicate content is of course still an issue. So here's my question: A client that sells floor heating systems that you can install yourself, has a product page for this topic and blog pages for questions regarding this topic. So following pages are on the website: Product page about the floor heating systems the client sells Blog article with tips how to install a floor heating system yourself Blog article about how to choose the right floor heating system These pages all answer different questions and are written about different topics. However, inevatibly all these pages also talk about different aspects of floor heating systems so this broad term comes up on all pages naturally. You could say that a solution is to merge pages and redirect the blogs to the product page, so the product page would answer all questions. But that is not what a customer is looking for. The goal of a product page is to trigger a conversion: let a customer contact the company or ask for a price offer. If the content on a product page is not comprehensive enough, the goal gets lost. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about tips and tricks on a product page. So how do you tackle this problem without creating duplicate content? In search results, the blog pages rank for the specific questions, but the product page doesn't rank for the generic term 'floor heating'. The internal link structure is ok: the product page has obviously more incoming links than the blogs. All on page SEO factors are taken care of as well. Any ideas on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
URL Structure for geo location for specific page
On hackerearth.com/challenges page, there is an option to select languages. This option is in the footer. Once you select the language the url changes. Ex - if we select French, the URL changes to hackereath.com/fr/challenges. In case we decide to change the URL of this page with Geo, what should be the URL structure which accommodates languages as well. My research says that it would good to keep the url like domainname.com/page/language.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rajnish_HE0 -
Need to change 1 million page URLs
Hey all, I have a community site where users are uploading photos and videos. Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that. All my content pages (individual photo/video) are looking like this: www.domain.com/12345-kw1-kw2-kw3-k4-k5 and so on. Where the 12345 is the unique content ID and the rest are keywords/tags added by the uploader. I would like to get rid of of the keywords after the ID in the URL. My site is well coded, so this can be easily done by changing a simple function, so my content page URLs become this: www.domain.com/ID What is the best course of action? 301 the KW URLs to non-KW version? Canonical? I really want to do this the proper way. Any advice is highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mlqsko0 -
Multiple product hierarchies (creation of refurbished products section) - best solution?
Hi all, I'm in discussion with a client who wishes to introduce a 'refurbished' products section to their website. This section will effectively replicate the structure of the 'brand new' products section. Unusually the key difference will be the fact that the 'refurbished' products section will feature significantly more products than the 'brand new' section, in the region of four times as many. As a guide the website currently stocks approximately 200 products across 8 core product areas. We have recommended that the two sections should be combined in order to prevent the creation of two separate product hierarchies. With 'brand new' / 'refurbished' products segmented via filter functionality. However the client is set on having two separate product hierarchies, i.e. a 'refurbished' section within a completely separate directory. Just wanted to crowd source opinion, in additionally to gaining insight if anyone has experience of a similar request. What solution did you implement? My feeling is that there is a high likelihood over time of the 'refurbished' section growing in authority and starting to outrank the 'brand new' products section. Not to mention a key missed opportunity to group and build authority / content within one product hierarchy. All thoughts and opinions much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 26ryan0 -
Ecommerce product URLs & flat architecture?
Hey Mozzers, I'm optimizing a small ecommerce site. The site URL directory structure seems all good & logical, BUT should I try for a flatter architecture - so that the individual products are at top level after the domain name in URLs? e.g.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregDixson
www.domain.com/first-item/
www.domain.com/second-item/
etc. etc. My current setup (I'm using the Woocommerce plugin in Wordpress): www.domain.com/shop/ (main shop page)
www.domain.com/shop/category-name-1/
www.domain.com/shop/category-name-2/
www.domain.com/shop/category-name-3/ with products appearing as:
www.domain.com/product/first-item/
www.domain.com/product/second-item/
etc. I've researched some big brand ecommerce sites and most seem to be domain.com/amazing-product/ even if the product itself is many categories or sub-categories down. i.e. Homepage > Home & Furniture > Furniture > Living Room Furniture > Coffee Tables As I say the information architecture makes sense from a user point of view, but I'm guessing the individual products would stand more chance of ranking if directly following the domain name? Woocommerce although flexible doesn't seem to do this out-of-the-box, so please some advice before I go on a hacking and URL rewriting mission! Thanks 🙂0 -
Do 404 pages pass link juice? And best practices...
Last year Google said bad links to 404 pages wouldn't hurt your site. Could that still be the case in light of recent Google updates to try and combat spammy links and negative SEO? Can links to 404 pages benefit a website and pass link juice? I'd assume at the very least that any link juice will pass through links FROM the 404 page? Many websites have great 404 pages that get linked to: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fretardzone.com%2F404 - that was the first of four I checked from the "60 Really Cool...404 Pages" that actually returned the 404 HTTP Status! So apologies if you find the word 'retard' offensive. According to Open Site Explorer it has a decent Page Authority and number of backlinks - but it doesn't show in Google's SERPs. I'd never do it, but if you have a particularly well-linked to 404 page, is there an argument for giving it 200 OK Status? Finally, what are the best practices regarding 404s and address bar links? For example, if
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford
www.examplesite.com/3rwdfs returns a 404 error, should I make that redirect to
www.examplesite.com/404 or leave it as is? Redirecting to www.examplesite.com/404 might not be user-friendly as people won't be able to correct the URL in the address bar. But if I have a great 404 page that people link to, I don't want links going to loads of random pages do I? Is either way considered best practice? If I did a 301 redirect I guess it would send the wrong signal to the crawlers? Should I use a 302 redirect, or even a 304 Not Modified redirect?1 -
Duplicate URL home page
I just got a duplicate URL error on by SEOMOZ report - and I wonder if I should worry about it Assume my site is named www.widgets.com I'm getting duplicate url from http://www.widgets.com & http://www.widgets.com/ Do the search engines really see this as different on the home page? The general drift on the web is that You site should look like Home page = http://www.widgets.com And subpages http://www.widgets.com/widget1/ Of course it seems as though the IIS7 slash tool will rewrite everything Including the home page to a slash.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasErb0