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
-
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Site not loading on Firefox
Hello guys, I can't get my website to be loaded on Firefox, why's that?
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Micro-sites for Landing Pages?
We are working with a site that is difficult at best to update. The client intends to re-do the site in 18 months or so but needs to start generating more traffic (and sales) now. What are thoughts on creating landing pages as micro-sites that point to the current site conversion page as a stop gap? Beyond not sharing authority is there any known penalty? By the way they don't have tremendous ranking right now - often bottom of page two - and the micro-site won't duplicate any content.
Technical SEO | | InformaticsInc0 -
How can you get the right site links for your site?
Hello all, I have been trying to get Google to list relevant site links for my site when you type in our brand name, Loco2 or for when Loco2 comes up in a search result. Different things come up when you search Loco2 and Loco 2. We would like site links to look like how they do when you search Loco 2. However Loco2 is our brand name, NOT Loco 2. Does anyone know why Google is doing this and whether we can influence results? We have done as much as possible via Google webmaster, in terms of specifying the links we DO NOT want Google to list for Loco2. However, when you search "Loco2", results only show simple site links. Ideally what we want is: Loco2 to be recognised as the brand NOT Loco 2 The same results (substantial, identical) for Loco2 as for Loco 2 (think o2 and o 2) For the site links to reflect the main pages of our site (Times & Tickets, Engine Room forum etc.) Many thanks in advance! Anila
Technical SEO | | anilababla0 -
Mobile site rank on Google S.E. instead of desktop site.
Hello, all SEOers~ Today, I would like to hear your opinion regarding on Mobile site and duplicate contents issue. I have a mobile version of our website that is hosted on a subdomain (m instead www). Site is targeting UK and Its essentially the same content, formatted differently. So every URL on www exists also at the "m" subdomain and is identical content. (there are some different contents, yet I could say about 90% or more contents are same) Recently I've noticed that search results are showing links to our mobile site instead of the desktop site. (Google UK) I have a sitemap.xml for both sites, the mobile sitemap defined as follows: I didn't block googlebot from mobile site and also didn't block googlebot-mobile from desktop site. I read and watched Google webmaster tool forum and related video from Matt Cutts. I found many opinion that there is possibility which cause duplicate contents issue and I should do one of followings. 1. Block googlebot from mobile site. 2. Use canonical Tag on mobile site which points to desktop site. 3. Create and develop different contents (needless to say...) Do you think duplicate contents issue caused my mobile site rank on S.E. instead of my desktop site? also Do you think those method will help to show my desktop site on S.E.? I was wondering that I have multi-country sites which is same site format as I mentioned above. However, my other country sites are totally doing fine on Google. Only difference that I found is my other country sites have different Title & Meta Tag comparing to desktop site, but my UK mobile site has same Title & Meta Tag comparing to desktop. Do you think this also has something to do with current problem? Please people~! Feel free to make some comments and share your opinion. Thanks for reading my long long explanation.
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
How to turn WP site into Ecom site?
I have a couple of old wordpress sites that are old affiliate blogs. I currently sell products that are on amazon on these sites and sell quite a bit of volume. I have found a source and can afford the inventory to replace Amazon with my own product. So the dilema is how to turn these wordpress sites into ecommerce sites. The thing I am worried most about is that each site gets about 100-200 visitors a day for great buying keywords. I obviously don't want to lose my rankings. What are the options of turning a wordpress site into a store. I am not interested in plugins or some of the other solutions that make the store look very cheap and I would assume horribly convert. If you have inner pages ranking for keywords how does that work? Do the post pages become product pages? So to sum up I guess I am asking, what are the options that are of the higher quality that will also help me keep my rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
301 redirect on the root of the site
Due to some historic difficulties with our URL Rewriter, we are in the position of having the root of our site 301 redirected to another page. So the root of our site: http://www.propertylive.co.uk/ has a 301 redirect to: http://www.propertylive.co.uk/home.aspx We're aware that this isn't great and we're working to fix this completely, but what impact will this have on our SEO?
Technical SEO | | LianWard860