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
-
Where to point canonical for m-dot site in the wake of Mobile-First Indexing
My client currently use an m-dot URL for their mobile site and while conducting a technical audit for their web properties, we have noticed that their desktop is using a self-referencing rel="canonical" while their mobile m-dot has no rel="canonical" tags. While our initial recommendation is to point the mobile m-dot point to the desktop using a rel="canonical" and the desktop point to the mobile using a rel="alternative," there have been hesitations about mobile first indexing and canonical tags. If Google will use the m-dot for indexing purposes moving forward, is the progressive recommendation to have the desktop point to the m-dot using a rel="canonical" and the m-dot point to the desktop using a rel="alternative" or to maintain the initially stated recommendation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Derek_Hawk0 -
Using del canonical for subpage relating to homepage
Hi, I have a subpage that has a Moz-Page Optimization score for a keyword of 98%. Nevertheless that page is not seen on page one of google. Instead google shows the homepage of the same site which has only an optimization score of around 50%. Now Moz suggests to implement a del canonical tag. Should I implement one in the subpage relating to the homepage? I have never done this and am a little unsure. What if there are other keywords for which the homepage should be shown? Will the homepage still show up? Best wishes Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Best support site software to use
Hi Guys We currently use Desk to run our company support site, it seems ok (I don't administer it), however is it very template driven and doesn't allow useful tools such as being able to add metadata to each page (hence in our Moz crawl tests we get a large number of no metadata errors (which seems like a lost opportunity for us to optimise the site). Our support team are looking to implement MadCap Flare as an information management tool, however this tool outputs HTML as iframes which obviously make it hard for google to crawl the content. We recently implemented HubSpot as our content marketing platform which is great, and we'd love to have the support site hosted on this (great for tracking traffic etc), however as far as I'm aware MadCap Flare doesn't integrate directly with HubSpot....so looking for suggestions on what others are successfully using to host/manage their SEO optimised support sites? Cheers Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SnapComms0 -
E-commerce site blog creating bad signals?
I have an e-commerce site with quite a large (subdirectory) blog attached. The blog is very successful, having attracted about 2 million visitors last year - almost 4 times that of our actual e-commerce pages. Although all content is tangentially relevant, the blog does not convert well directly (mostly because it attracts people at the wrong point in the funnel). Our average bounce rate on e-commerce pages is around 40%, while the blog is about 90% (it answers questions directly with some outbound links); and average page visits to e-commerce pages is 4, compared to 1.3 on the blog. I am concerned that this 80% of my traffic that does not often convert and leaves the site quickly, is costing me in rankings on the pages that do perform well. We recently re-released the e-commerce section of the site and despite cleaning up our structure and content, fixing bad URL structure etc., we saw little benefit. I am therefore considering taking the blog OFF our site and moving it elsewhere, linking back to the e-commerce site and allowing it to stand on its own two feet. Is this a bad idea? Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | redtalons10 -
URL Parameters as a single solution vs Canonical tags
Hi all, We are running a classifieds platform in Spain (mercadonline.es) that has a lot of duplicate content. The majority of our duplicate content consists of URL's that contain site parameters. In other words, they are the result of multiple pages within the same subcategory, that are sorted by different field names like price and type of ad. I believe if I assign the correct group of url's to each parameter in Google webmastertools then a lot these duplicate issues will be resolved. Still a few questions remain: Once I set f.ex. the 'page' parameter and i choose 'paginates' as a behaviour, will I let Googlebot decide whether to index these pages or do i set them to 'no'? Since I told Google Webmaster what type of URL's contain this parameter, it will know that these are relevant pages, yet not always completely different in content. Other url's that contain 'sortby' don't differ in content at all so i set these to 'sorting' as behaviour and set them to 'no' for google crawling. What parameter can I use to assign this to 'search' I.e. the parameter that causes the URL's to contain an internal search string. Since this search parameter changes all the time depending on the user input, how can I choose the best one. I think I need 'specifies'? Do I still need to assign canonical tags for all of these url's after this process or is setting parameters in my case an alternative solution to this problem? I can send examples of the duplicates. But most of them contain 'page', 'descending' 'sort by' etc values. Thank you for your help. Ivor
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
Blogs and E-Commerce websites
I have recently launched an e-commerce website which has a whopping domain authority of 1! I was thinking about adding a blog to it (it's in open cart), but that would mean creating it in a wordpress but using the same domain name. Would this be beneficial from an SEO stand point (i.e sending traffic to w blog that isn't actually on the e-commerce website itself) , or am I better off creating content as blogs/articles on other people sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lindsayjhopkins0 -
Wildcard Redirects & Canonical Tags
I have an interesting situation. Current URLs Example1: www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NakulGoyal
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234.html New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-4567.html Current URLs Example2: www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html New URL:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789.html Current URLs Example3: www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5-1.html
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5-1-1.html Canonical on All Above URLs:
www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html New URL:
www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html I want to make sure all variations of the above URL redirect to the new URLs. However, as you see in Example 3, we are dealing with variables that are passed on. (+5 in this case). Question 1: What wildcard 301 redirect / regular expression can I use to tackle these ? Question 2: If we redirect www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html to www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html and www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html contains the canonical tag www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html, any concerns or red flags here ?0 -
How to use modrewrite to redirect certain portions of a site
Hello! My question is as follows: Suppose there is SiteA which is a blog that has a url structure of http://www.siteA.com/blog/category/article Now suppose I'd like to redirect those articles to a new domain (which has the same url structure) BUT excluding a certain category, say, 'blah/' so in other words, some examples: http://www.siteA.com/blog/shoes/best-shoes-to-buy ->redirects-> http://www.siteB.com/blog/shoes/best-shoes-to-buy/ (there is a trailing slash here for some reason) BUT http://www.siteA.com/blog/blah/foo-bar -NO REDIRECT- (because it's in the /blah/ category). Any and all feedback & help would be much appreciated 🙂 Thanks!~
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apo11o1770