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
-
Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?
Hey there! My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try. The site URL is: https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/ However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site. https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/ And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially. I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work. Any insight would be immensely helpful. Thanks! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
How does product category description affect SEO?
Hi - we are a website that sells tours. We have category pages that list the tours in that category (by city, by length of time, theme, etc). At the top of each category page, before the buttons linking to the tours, there is a category description. It is a pretty long paragraph. We are redesigning the website and think it would look nicer to show 2-3 lines of text and then have a down arrow and 'read' more so people can click and it would expand to show the full category description if they want to read it and it won't take up so much room that way. My question is - will this affect SEA at all? Or because the text is still there, just hidden, it won't do anything? Our site ranks very high in organic searches on google and we do not want to do anything that will hurt SEO. thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shirapn0 -
SEO Best Practices regarding Robots.txt disallow
I cannot find hard and fast direction about the following issue: It looks like the Robots.txt file on my server has been set up to disallow "account" and "search" pages within my site, so I am receiving warnings from the Google Search console that URLs are being blocked by Robots.txt. (Disallow: /Account/ and Disallow: /?search=). Do you recommend unblocking these URLs? I'm getting a warning that over 18,000 Urls are blocked by robots.txt. ("Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt"). Seems that I wouldn't want that many urls blocked. ? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamiegriz0 -
E-Commerce Site Collection Pages Not Being Indexed
Hello Everyone, So this is not really my strong suit but I’m going to do my best to explain the full scope of the issue and really hope someone has any insight. We have an e-commerce client (can't really share the domain) that uses Shopify; they have a large number of products categorized by Collections. The issue is when we do a site:search of our Collection Pages (site:Domain.com/Collections/) they don’t seem to be indexed. Also, not sure if it’s relevant but we also recently did an over-hall of our design. Because we haven’t been able to identify the issue here’s everything we know/have done so far: Moz Crawl Check and the Collection Pages came up. Checked Organic Landing Page Analytics (source/medium: Google) and the pages are getting traffic. Submitted the pages to Google Search Console. The URLs are listed on the sitemap.xml but when we tried to submit the Collections sitemap.xml to Google Search Console 99 were submitted but nothing came back as being indexed (like our other pages and products). We tested the URL in GSC’s robots.txt tester and it came up as being “allowed” but just in case below is the language used in our robots:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /9545580/checkouts
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b
Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b
Disallow: /design_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_script_id
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml A Google Cache:Search currently shows a collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products. Please let us know if there’s any other details we could provide that might help. Any insight or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts! Thank you in advance. Best,0 -
Taxonomy question - best approach for site structure
Hi all, I'm working on a dentist's website and want some advice on the best way to lay out the navigation. I would like to know which structure will help the site work naturally. I feel the second example would be better as it would focus the 'power' around the type of treatment and get that to rank better. .com/assessment/whitening
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
.com/assessment/straightening
.com/treatment/whitening
.com/treatment/straightening or .com/whitening/assessment
.com/straightening/assessment
.com/whitening/treatment
.com/straightening/treatment Please advise, thanks.0 -
Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301
I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site. Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc. We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy. We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites. Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow. Do you think that is the case? What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
Redirecting one site to another for link juice
I have two sites with same theme - buying cars. I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bestone0 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0