Volusion eCommerce Site 302s and Canonicalization
-
There have been a couple other threads concerning this topic so I apologize, but I have an iteration on the main question that has not been answered.
Crawl Diagnostics is giving me a bunch of 302 temporary redirect notices. For example, here is a page title URL:
http://store.in-situ.com/Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/0073380.htmand here is the redirect:
http://store.in-situ.com/Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/tape-clt-meter.htm?1=1&CartID=0The first link is actually a child product of:
http://store.in-situ.com//Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/tape-clt-meter.htmVolusion tech support told me they believe most of them are meta redirects but could not find any documentation on them. All the other threads concerning this have said to either change the 302s to 301s, which I don't think is possible, or to add a nofollow tag.
My question is do I need to do anything if both those pages are canonical to the parent product? Should I be passing on the linkjuice if neither of those pages are of high value?
-
This is correct.
-
Thank you for the details Nathan. I will contact Volusion directly. But to summarize for any other users happening upon this thread:
The answer to your question is that no, we are not planing to change all of our URLs at once. This will be an ongoing need, perhaps maybe 10 URLs per month on a continuing basis. The scenario is that in the past, when we made an engineering change to our products, we did not generally issue a new product code in Volusion. But for tracking, warranty, and UL listing purposes, going forward, we need to begin issuing new product codes when engineering changes occur. So, when we make a form/fit/function change to a product 12345-A, we will need to create a new product 12345-B.
The solution of canonical relationship links is not applicable here, because we are not just talking about SEO. Any visitor who arrives on 12345-A need to be taken to 12345-B. The canonical will help the search engines avoid duplicate indexing, but it is just as important for us to manage the visits of real users (who may arrive from links other than those in search engine results). So, we need a redirect. Volusion does provide a method for this (http://support.volusion.com/article/using-redirects-products-volusion), but this method issues a 302 redirect which is not desirable for SEO purposes.
And Volusion also provides a method for administering 301 redirects, but only when the requested page does not exist.
So, in the reply from Nathan above, he is recommending to physically delete the old product from the database so that the original page does not exist, and set up redirects using the Volusion application, after the deletion has been done.
There are some details to be considered when taking this approach, so we are going to contact Volusion directly to work through those. But I wanted to summarize here to help others who may have a similar need. Nathan, if I've incorrectly summarized, please add-on. Thanks.
-
Hi drewk,
Are you wanting to supplant your existing URLs with new URLs? If this is the case the Volusion 301 manager will work for you:
1. Back up your product's database
2. Map your legacy URLs to your new equivalent. Might want to save a copy in Drive or Excel. Since you are creating new URLs, make sure they are both search and user friendly.
3. Add in your 301's and remove your legacy pages. I STRONGLY suggest testing this on a few low priority pages first before confidently rolling it out across the site. The 301 manager will only return the 301 response if the legacy page is removed. A hidden product is still an active page.
4. Submit the new URLs from your test to the search engines; i.e. Google Fetch via Google Webmaster Tools and make sure Google recognizes the 301 redirects and has indexed your new URLs. This may take a couple days.
5. Assuming this process goes smoothly for you, roll it out across your website. Depending on how large your website is, you might want to do this slowly to minimize any temporary loss in rankings and traffic.
Basically, this is definitely a delicate process and we don't usually recommend merchants to change product codes holistically. I'd recommend working with our SEO services team if you are hesitant about executing this: http://www.volusion.com/ecommerce-seo-services
If you do want to keep legacy URLs and create new URLs with new product codes, you can add the new URLs as canonicals on the legacy pages. There is no guarantee Google or the other search engines will respect this directive, but they should. This is a safer route, but you'll have many more pages to manage and there is no guarantee the search engines will rank your new URLs over the legacy. Again, please contact our services team to go over all your options.
Regards,
Nathan
-
Nathan,
We have a very similar question, and would like your opinion. We are also a Volusion customer, and in the near future will need to create new revisions of many of our existing product codes. For tracking reasons, we wish to create a new product code. Because Volusion can only perform a redirect when the original requested page does not exist, we were planning to use this procedure here: http://support.volusion.com/article/using-redirects-products-volusion.
However, when we tested this procedure, which seems to apply to our scenario, the Volusion application issues a 302 redirect instead of a 301 redirect. And I'm very hesitant to use this because 302 redirects evidently pass 0% link juice (https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection).
Nakul above wrote that possibly a combination of the 302 redirect PLUS a canonical might be the solution. However, I'm not yet sure if the canonical tag on the child product would be followed if the page has already redirected (via 302) to the parent page.
Do you have any insight you can share on this, specific to how Volusion recommends to handle this scenario?
-
It's always good to see vendors helping out on here. Thanks Nathan!
-
Hi Taylor, Nakul is correct. Please let me know if I can provide any further assistance.
Regards,
Nathan
-
Taylor, you are 100% on the right track. All the answers exist in your question.
#1. These are "redirect notices", not errors. More like warnings.
#2. As long as they are canonicalized correctly, which you said "do I need to do anything if both those pages are canonical to the parent product".There's absolutely nothing you need to do. You are good. It's always good and important to verify these technical SEO issues. I hope this 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
-
Sitemap submission for site migration?
Hi mozzers, We're about to migrate 4 domains into 1. Is there a particular way I should generate and submit the sitemap or should I just follow the same protocol as for one domain? Should I even worry submitting a sitemap when the site has this drupal module? I have access to the webmaster tools of all domains, should I do something specific on the accounts that are migrating besides submitting a sitemap? Thanks for letting me know!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Google Indexing of Site Map
We recently launched a new site - on June 4th we submitted our site map to google and almost instantly had all 25,000 URL's crawled (yay!). On June 18th, we made some updates to the title & description tags for the majority of pages on our site and added new content to our home page so we submitted a new sitemap. So far the results have been underwhelming and google has indexed a very low number of the updated pages. As a result, only a handful of the new titles and descriptions are showing up on the SERP pages. Any ideas as to why this might be? What are the tricks to having google re-index all of the URLs in a sitemap?
Technical SEO | | Emily_A0 -
ECommerce .com or .co.uk
I'm in the process of putting together an eCommerce site selling greetings cards. I would like to sell the cards to both the US and UK markets. I also want to have the best chance of ranking well in the US and UK SERPs. Should I build 2 sites using the same products/content on a .com and .co.uk domain (dup content issues?), or should I have one site with the ability to checkout in either currency? Any thoughts / guidance would be very much appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | TPearson0 -
New "Static" Site with 302s
Hey all, Came across a bit of an interesting challenge recently, one that I was hoping some of you might have had experience with! We're currently in the process of a website rebuild, for which I'm really excited. The new site is using Markdown to create an entirely static site. Load-times are fantastic, and the code is clean. Life is good, apart from the 302s. One of the weird quirks I've realized is that with oldschool, non-server-generated page content is that every page of the site is an Index.html file in a directory. The resulting in a www.website.com/page-title will 302 to www.website.com/page-title/. My solution off the bat has been to just be super diligent and try to stay on top of the link profile and send lots of helpful emails to the staff reminding them about how to build links, but I know that even the best laid plans often fail. Has anyone had a similar challenge with a static site and found a way to overcome it?
Technical SEO | | danny.wood1 -
Two Sites - One Domain
I just want to be sure, but if I install a Wordpress blog in a subfolder of a HTML site, Google will see that as one site, not two different sites, correct? Even if there is two index files?
Technical SEO | | jshiraz0 -
Adding Google +1 To My Site
This may seem like a silly question, but I had my site designed by a third party and I don't know how to find this info. I want to add Google +1 button to my site. I've already added the script that makes it work in my , but don't know how to add the to the part of my site I'd like the icon to appear. If you take a look at my site, http://www.youdrivethesuccess.com/, you will see the twitter and facebook icons that follow you around the site in the top right of the page. I'd like to drop in the +1 right next to them, but I don't know how to get to it. How do I access this on the server? What section of my FTP do these lil icons live? A folder? Any direction is greatly appreciated...thanks.
Technical SEO | | brentmitchell0 -
Canonical on ecommerce pages
I have seen some competitors using the nofollow tag as well as canonical on all refinements and sorts on their ecommerce pages. Example being if you went to their hard drive category page and refined by 500gb hard drives then that page would have a canonical element to send it back to hard drives page without the refinement. I see how this could be good for control indexation and the amount pages Google crawls, but do you see problems in using the canonical tag this way? Also I have seen competitors have category page descriptions (describing what that type of product is) on all pagenation and refinements (the exact same block of text on all of the pages). Would this be a duplicate content problem or is it not that big of a deal since the content is only on their site so they are only competiting with themselves. Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | Gordian0 -
Canonicalization
Having been a member of SEOmoz Pro tools for only a couple of months, I'm now at a point where there are certain issues with our recently overhauled site: On my latest "Open Site Explorer Report" I am seeing a number of external links going to the HTTP://Domainname.com and a number pointing at HTTP://wwwDomainname.com. This only appears when I pull the report from the Root Domain. If I pull a report from the Sub-domain all URL's are the same. Does this matter too much? Would best practice be to put a rel=canonical on the Non www ? Thanks for any help in advance Sean
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0