Use Nonindex or Canonical on product tags of a e-commerce site
-
I run a e-commerce site and we have many product tags. These product tags come up as "Duplicate Page Content" when Moz does it's crawl. I was wondering if I should use Nonindex or Canonical? The tags all go to the same product when used so I figure I would just nonindex them but was wondering what's the best for SEO?
-
Hi Emmett
So good to hear! For reference, here's what I recommended to Emmett...
I would just goto the category pages creating duplicate content issues and add some text. Here's an example from an Inflow article I often reference (http://www.goinflow.com/duplicate-content-ecommerce-seo/
"Category pages on eCommerce websites typically include a title and product grid. This means that there is no unique content on these pages. The common solution to combat this is to add unique descriptions at the top of category pages (not the bottom, where content is given less weight by search engines) that describes what types are featured within the category. There is no magic number of words or characters to use, however the more robust the content is, the better chance the page will be able to maximize traffic from organic search results (due to long-tail keyword traffic). A benchmark of 100-300 words is common. It’s important to understand screen resolutions of your visitors and ensure that the product grid is not pushed below the fold on their browsers. Doing so could limit user discoverability of the product grid upon visiting the category page.
Tip: Intro descriptions on category pages offer a great opportunity to build deep links to related sub-category pages, related article content that may exist on the site, and popular products that deserve attention and link equity."
If you have the opportunity to do so, try that out. You're developing unique content for that page and also giving the user a bit of perspective to really "sell" them on your products.
Again - glad to hear this worked! Let me know if you need anything else!
-
So adding description did work. If you have multiple product tags that comes up as duplicated pages, just a description to the tags and that will fix everything.
Cheers!
Emmett
-
Thanks for the update, Emmett. And best of luck to you! Looking forward to some even better news soon!
Christy
-
Sounds great Emmett! Let me know if you need anything else and how everything goes!!
-
So Patrick came to the conclusion to add a description to the each product tag page which is good for SEO and a good marketing technique. I add the descriptions and I'm just wait 48 hours to do a new crawl test. I'll update you as soon as it's a confirmed solution.
Cheers!
Emmett
-
Hi Emmett, have you been able to sort this out yet? We'd love an update, thanks!
Christy
-
AH! Just saw it! Sorry for my delay! I will respond here in a few! Thanks Emmett.
-
Hey Patrick,
I sent you a message with a link to the website and the product page. Let me know what you think.
I appreciate your time!
-
Guys, please could you let me know the outcome of this as well. I realise the necessity of the canonical tag regarding the categorization of pages but this tag issue is a concern to me so I would really appreciate the findings.
-
Hi Emmett
Could you shoot me a private message and let me take a look? I think I am following what you're saying, but without a real life example, I don't know how much help I can be. I still stand by canonicalizing your main product pages, in my example...
www.example.com/products/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeans
...for the other two pages...
www.example.com/collections/frontpage/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeans
www.example.com/clothing/womens/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeansSo, these two pages above would have...
...in their . But again, if you could pass me a link or URL, I can see what's going on and be of more assistance!
Hope this will help you a bit better! Thanks so much!
-
Yeah it's like that. I'll elaborate my situation better with your example:
Product 1 URL: www.example.com/products/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeans
Product Tag 1: www.example.com/product-tag/women-jeans
Product Tag 2: www.example.com/product-tag/blue-jeans
Product 2 URL**:** ww.example.com/products/blue-regular-fit-jeans
Product Tag 1: www.example.com/product-tag/women-jeans
Product Tag 2: www.example.com/product-tag/blue-jeans
When you go to one of the product tags webpage, both products come up on the webpage.
Since both these products show up in the same product tag webpage and I can only use one URL per canonical tag, how do I determine what canonical URL to put in the product tag code? Would I just pick a product and associate a tag to it? For Example, Use Product 2 URL as the canonical tag for Product Tag 2 and Product 1 URL for Product Tag 1?
-
Hi Emmett
For each product, do URLs look something like this when it comes to tags...
www.example.com/products/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeans
www.example.com/collections/frontpage/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeans
www.example.com/clothing/womens/blue-lowrise-skinny-jeansIf that's the case, you will want to put a canonical tag on these pages for the page you want to appear in search and rank. The reason you are doing so is because you have three different URLs for the same product. You want search engines to know this is not duplicate content.
Does this make sense? Or am I not following along correctly? Let me know, as I would love to get you where you need to be! Thanks!
-
Thanks for the quick response!
I'm still a little confused. The way the site is setup is that we have many different products that share the same "products tags" (so each product tag is linked to multiple products). Each product has many products tags (about 10 per product). I'm not sure how to use a canonical tag on a tag that is associated to multiple products, or on a product that is associated to many tags.
Do you have any suggestions?
-
Hi there
Emmett - do not noindex. Use a canonical tag on these tagged pages - you can learn more here.
You can also categorize parameters in Google Webmaster Tools.
Hope this helps a bit!
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
-
How many images should I use in structured data for a product?
We have a basic printing website that offers business cards. Each type of business card has a few product images. Should we use structured data for all the images, or just the main image? What is your opinion about this? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
Should I use individual product pages for different formats of the same product?
Hi All -- I'm working with a publishing client who is launching a new site. They have a large product catalogue offered in a number of format types (print, ebook, online learning, packages) with each one possessing a unique ISBN code. From past experience, I know that ISBN codes can be a really important ranking factor. We are currently trying to sort out product page guidelines. The proposed methods are: A single product page for all formats. The user then has the option to select which format they wish to purchase. The page would contain all key descriptors for each format, including: individual ISBN, format, title, price, author, etc. We would then use schema mark-up just to assist search engines with understanding and crawling. BUT we worry that the single page won't rank as well as say an invidual product page with a unique ISBN in the URL (for example: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470573325.html) Which leads to the next option... Individual URLs for each format. We understand that most e-commerce guidelines state you shouldn't dilute link equity amongst multiple pages with very similar products and descriptions. BUT we want searchers to be able to search by individual ISBN and still find that specific format within the SERPs. This seems to rule out canonicalizing, because we don't prefer one format over the other and still want say the ebook to show up as much as the print version. If anyone has any other options or considerations that we haven't thought about, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, U
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HarborOneBank0 -
Using rel cannonical to host a blog as a path on our e-commerce website
There has been recent suggestion (from Rand) that hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain is much better from an SEO point of view. Unfortunately, our blog is hosted on a subdomain with a different technology stack to the main e-commerce site. We are finding it quite tricky to migrate to a folder given the different technologies. Is the following a suitable solution? - 301 redirect from mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post to blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post - And then put mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post" /> on blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post Would be great to have your thoughts on this guys - I can't figure out if it will work or be an SEO fail.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HireSpace0 -
Investigating Google's treatment of different pages on our site - canonicals, addresses, and more.
Hey all - I hesitate to ask this question, but have spent weeks trying to figure it out to no avail. We are a real estate company and many of our building pages do not show up for a given address. I first thought maybe google did not like us, but we show up well for certain keywords 3rd for Houston office space and dallas office space, etc. We have decent DA and inbound links, but for some reason we do not show up for addresses. An example, 44 Wall St or 44 Wall St office space, we are no where to be found. Our title and description should allow us to easily picked up, but after scrolling through 15 pages (with a ton of non relevant results), we do not show up. This happens quite a bit. I have checked we are being crawled by looking at 44 Wall St TheSquareFoot and checking the cause. We have individual listing pages (with the same titles and descriptions) inside the buildings, but use canonical tags to let google know that these are related and want the building pages to be dominant. I have worked though quite a few tests and can not come up with a reason. If we were just page 7 and never moved it would be one thing, but since we do not show up at all, it almost seems like google is punishing us. My hope is there is one thing that we are doing wrong that is easily fixed. I realize in an ideal world we would have shorter URLs and other nits and nats, but this feels like something that would help us go from page 3 to page 1, not prevent us from ranking at all. Any thoughts or helpful comments would be greatly appreciated. http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10005/lower-manhattan/44-wall-st/44-wall-street We do show up one page 1 for this building - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10036/midtown/1501-broadway, but is the exception. I have tried investigating any differences, but am quite baffled.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AtticusBerg10 -
Is this all that is needed for a 'canonical' tag?
Hello, I have a Joomla site. I have put in a plugin to make the page source show: eg. <link href="[http://www.ditalia.com.au/designer-fabrics-designer-fabric-italian-material-and-french-lace](view-source:http://www.ditalia.com.au/designer-fabrics-designer-fabric-italian-material-and-french-lace)" rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" /> Is this all that is need to tell the search engines to ignore the any other links or indexed pages with a url which is created automatically by the system before the SEF urls are initiated?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | infinart0 -
What should I do when there is no more stock for a product (e-commerce) ?
I´ve several clientes with magento, wp and brazilian Vtex.... usually when a product is out of stock the system allow you to delete or desallow but you will create a 404 erros. There is a plugin to redirect disallow products to home os a personalized page... looks good. But I´ve just realized when you edit the name (and url) of a product it creats automatic redirect of the product... Now I´m wondering never delete or disallow a product page anymore.... always edit with a new product so the redirect can send some PR to the new produtc.... Sounds too stupid or make any sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
Canonical Tag Uses Source Title and Meta Data?
When optimising a regional same language micro site within a sub folder of a .com it dawned on me that our use of the hreflang and canonical meta elements will render individual elements such as H1 and title obsolete. As a canonical tag takes the canonical source title and meta right? It would still have value in optimising localised headings though? Appreciate any thoughts, suggestions (o:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3wh0 -
Should product searches (on site searches) be noindex?
We have a large new site that is suffering from a sitewide panda like penalty. The site has 200k pages indexed by Google. Lots of category and sub category page content and about 25% of the product pages have unique content hand written (vs the other pages using copied content). So it seems our site is labeled as thin. I'm wondering about using noindex paramaters for the internal site search. We have a canonical tag on search results pointing to domain.com/search/ (client thought that would help) but I'm wondering if we need to just no index all the product search results. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0