Canonicalising a product with multiple variants
-
I am working with an ecommerce site and have encountered an issue I haven't come across before and would appreciate some advice on how to proceed.
There are multiple variation products with one master product and then up to 20 or 30 variant products, the variation could be colour, size or both. The site has been set up to canonicalise all the variations to the master variant product, which I understand to be best practice. But, this is where the issue occurs, the master variant product URL 302 redirects to one of the variant product URLs. Example below. My question is, is this harmful to our SEO efforts? Would be be best to canonicalise to a preferred colour or size variation?
EXAMPLE:
Master variant product: www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123
Seeing this product on the page and clicking will 302 redirect to www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456
On page www.example/co.uk/primiary-category/product-123/colour-456 the canonical tag is www.example.co.uk/primary-category/product-123
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
-
Hi Nick,
Thanks for your response. At the moment we have around 2000 products and some of the canonical pages do rank, others don't so it does seem the search engine in confused.
The article on SiteBulb is really interesting and I agree with your reasoning to canonicalise to either the most vanilla or popular product variant.
Many thanks,
Simon
-
Hi Simon,
Quick question which I think I can guess the answer, does the current canonical page rank for anything at all?
Can't the developers make the canonical a static page (which currently redirects) default to the most popular and or a vanilla combination of product attributes?
That would of course be the best option, failing that you would have to just canonicalise to the most popular product variation and do so in a way that doesn't create a redirect chain.
I literally just referenced SiteBulb in another post, and I don't want to come across like a shill but there's a great explanation of it your issue here: https://sitebulb.com/hints/indexability/canonical-hints/canonical-points-to-a-redirecting-url/
Easier said than done for sure with some CMS and E-Commerce sites, but as the aforementioned link says...it's generally dealt with on a case by case basis.
Appreciate this is isn't a definitive answer but I hope it helps!
Nick
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
-
Content on product category pages - does Google care?
Hi All, I've always been unsure about the importance of content on product category pages. Nobody reads it. If you search for "living room chairs", you're just going to want to see a big list of living room chairs - not read content about living room chairs, how to choose one, etc. On virtually any ecommerce site, category pages have a paragraph or two of total bla-bla. Does this have any impact on search rankings? More specifically, will Googlebot see content on how to choose a living room chair and say "Yes! This is really helpful content"? Or, will it realize that the searcher intent on this keyword is really just to see a list of chairs, and ignore this content - or at least downplay its importance? WDTY?
On-Page Optimization | | BarryBuckman0 -
What is the perfect way to handle multiple sitemaps index in Search Console?
Hello friends, I have this doubt for a long and i want to share it with you. In our agency many clients have a PHP template for the home page of their sites, and also have a blog with wordpress as CMS. When i am optimizing sitemaps, I have two separate files, an index of Sitemaps created with Wordpress SEO by Yoast (which inside has separate Sitemaps tags, categories, posts, pages, authors, etc.) and on the other hand the home page sitemap with the subsections. As you know the sitemap generated by "Wordpress SEO by Yoast" is dynamic as it creates the sitemap according to current site content, and is updated every time a new entry is raised or modify any URL. This makes it very practical. I can not have a unique index sitemap sitemaps nesting inside another, as it is not allowed by Google or Sitemap protocol. I read in the Google Support you can upload multiple sitemaps to Search Console but does not say anywhere on upload multiple sitemaps index, or a combination thereof. In my case, I would have to upload two separately files, the dynamically generated with wordpress and the manual created for the PHP template. In my opinion there is no problem and Google will index everything properly performing it this way, but I wanted to share it with you to see how you solve this problem and what experiences had. Thanks and best regards.
On-Page Optimization | | NachoRetta1 -
E-commerce can we delete all products that have never sold for 10 years?
Hello, We're switching from a mediocre cart to Volusion.com, which I love. We've been in business for 10 years and have 8500 products. At least 75% of the products have never sold once. How do we know how many of those we can delete when switching carts? We only want to switch over the products we have to. Thanks! Bob
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Add multiple H2 tags on a single page. Good or Bad?
Can we add Multipal H2 tags on a single page, Is good or Bad. Here is an example - http://packforcity.com/things-to-do-in-new-york-city/
On-Page Optimization | | ross254sidney0 -
Writing Service/Product Descriptions
Hi, I work for a site that allows people to book a variety of different services in different locations (mainly hair and beauty related). The site is still in development so I can't link to it I'm afraid. My colleague is about to start writing these descriptions for each of the beauty salons we have signed up and I thought I'd take the opportunity to check what everyone else thought about these descriptions. As far as I'm concerned, a near perfect example can be found at http://www.toptable.co.uk/fishers-in-the-city We have about 100 words at the most, so I was thinking that as long as we get in the name of the salon, the location (being more descriptive than the general area our services search function allows for) and the USP of each salon - their specialty services. Is there anything else you'd include? Foremost, I want this to be as descriptive as possible to offer more detailed information about the salon. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
What is the most effective eCommerce product / category structure?
Hi all, We sell musical equipment, and we have been debating about how to structure our website in terms of products and categories. These are our two options: Each category page lists sub-categories _and _all of the products contained within each of these sub-categories, so e.g. the "Guitars" category page would contain links to "Electric Guitars" and "Acoustic Guitars" as well as a big list of electric and acoustic guitars. Each category page lists only its sub-categories, unless it is a "leaf" node, in which case it lists all the products, so e.g. category "Guitars" just has two links - to "Electric Guitars" and "Acoustic Guitars" - and no products. Option 2 means customers don't see products until they've decided which category they want, which doesn't seem ideal to me, but SEO-wise, which is best? Thanks! Alex
On-Page Optimization | | reddogmusic0 -
E-Commerce product pages that have multiple skus with unique pages.
Hey Guys, With the recent farm/panda update from google i'm at a cross roads as to how I should optimize product pages for a project i'm working on for a client. My client sells tires and one particular tire brand can have up to 15 models and each model can have up to 30 sizes. IE: 'Michelin Pilot Sport Cup' comes in 15 different sizes. Each size will have it's unique product page and description bringing me to my question. Should I use the same description on every size? I do plan on writting unique content for each tire model however i'm not sure if I should do it for every size. After all the tire model description is the same for every size, each size doesn't carry any unique characteristics that I can describe. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | MikeDelaCruz770 -
Link Product Thumb & Product Name with same anchor link?
We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name. So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links. Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link? We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy. It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.
On-Page Optimization | | AarcMediaGroup0