What is the best practice for URLs for E-commerce products in multiple categories?
-
Hello all!
I have always worked successfully with SEO on E-commerce sites, however we are currently revamping an older site for a client and so I thought I'd turn to the community to ask what the best practices that you guys are experiencing for url structures at the moment.
Obviously we do not wish to create duplicate content and so the big question is, what would you guys do for the very best structure for URLs on an E-commerce site that has products in multiple categories?
Let's imagine we are selling toy cars. I have a sports car for sale, so naturally it can go in the sports cars category and it could also go in to the convertibles category too. What is the best way you have found recently that works and increases rankings, but does not create duplicate content?
Thanks in advance!
Kind Regards,
JDM
-
Does the platform you are using let you select a default category for the product? Several platforms will let you select multiple categories and make you chose one as a default category. If so, you can just work off the uri of the page and insert the default category as the canonical category in the rel=canonical.
-
Use the rel=canonical tag so that all URL's would point to the 'end' toy car page - hence avoiding any duplicate content. If there isn't much content anyway, Google has said they actually wouldn't penalise for this.
I had a little look and found something slightly similar I guess here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/wFlGmPiQe5E
I'd def use Rel=Canonical though
Jamie
-
Hi Hatfish,
If both categories are relevant and deserve their own areas, then put the products in both the hierarchies. Then, decide which heirarchy is the most important (from a SERPs perspective) and Canonical the product URL to a single URL.
Using your example:
The sports car category would be my main category. When you navigate to the Convertibles category you would be able to find that sports car. However, when visiting the product the URL would resolve to a single URL. So, if I was in the convertible category it would send me to the Sports Car hierarchy page (through a 301 redirect).
Make sure to identify 1 URL for canonical purposes
Make sure to 301 the subordinate URL to the main URL
This way the user can use both areas to navigate through your site and find the product they are looking for. But, as far as SEO is concerned there is only 1 main URL for each product.
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
-
301 vs Canonical - With A Side of Partial URL Rewrite and Google URL Parameters-OH MY
Hi Everyone, I am in the middle of an SEO contract with a site that is partially HTML pages and the rest are PHP and part of an ecommerce system for digital delivery of college classes. I am working with a web developer that has worked with this site for many years. In the php pages, there are also 6 different parameters that are currently filtered by Google URL parameters in the old Google Search Console. When I came on board, part of the site was https and the remainder was not. Our first project was to move completely to https and it went well. 301 redirects were already in place from a few legacy sites they owned so the developer expanded the 301 redirects to move everything to https. Among those legacy sites is an old site that we don't want visible, but it is extensively linked to the new site and some of our top keywords are branded keywords that originated with that site. Developer says old site can go away, but people searching for it are still prevalent in search. Biggest part of this project is now to rewrite the dynamic urls of the product pages and the entry pages to the class pages. We attempted to use 301 redirects to redirect to the new url and prevent the draining of link juice. In the end, according to the developer, it just isn't going to be possible without losing all the existing link juice. So its lose all the link juice at once (a scary thought) or try canonicals. I am told canonicals would work - and we can switch to that. My questions are the following: 1. Does anyone know of a way that might make the 301's work with the URL rewrite? 2. With canonicals and Google parameters, are we safe to delete the parameters after we have ensures everything has a canonical url (parameter pages included)? 3. If we continue forward with 301's and lose all the existing links, since this only half of the pages in the site (if you don't count the parameter pages) and there are only a few links per page if that, how much of an impact would it have on the site and how can I avoid that impact? 4. Canonicals seem to be recommended heavily these days, would the canonical urls be a better way to go than sticking with 301's. Thank you all in advance for helping! I sincerely appreciate any insight you might have. Sue (aka Trudy)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TStorm1 -
Best SEO Practices for Displaying FAQs throughout site?
I've got an FAQ plugin (Ultimate FAQ) for a Wordpress site with tons of content (like 30 questions each with a page full, multi-paragraphs, of answers with good info -- stuff Google LOVES.) Right now, I have a main FAQ page that has 3 categories and about 10 questions under each category and each question is collapsed by default. You click an arrow to expand it to reveal the answer.I then have a single category's questions also displayed at the bottom of an appropriate related page. So the questions appear in two places on the site, always collapsed by default.Each question has a permalink that links to an individual page with only that question and answer.I know Google discounts (doesn't ignore) content that is hidden by default and requires a click (via js function) to reveal it.So what I'm wondering is if the way I have it setup is optimal for SEO? How is Google going to handle the questions being in essentially three places: it's own standalone page, in a list on a category page, and in a list on a page showing all questions for all categories. Should I make the questions not collapsed by default (which will make the master FAQ page SUPER long!)Does Google not mind the duplicate content within the site?What's the best strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoJaz0 -
Best practice to prevent pages from being indexed?
Generally speaking, is it better to use robots.txt or rel=noindex to prevent duplicate pages from being indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Is it a bad idea to use our meta description as a short description of a product on that product page?
Does this count as duplicating content even though the meta description has no effect on search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | USAMM0 -
Best way to permanently remove URLs from the Google index?
We have several subdomains we use for testing applications. Even if we block with robots.txt, these subdomains still appear to get indexed (though they show as blocked by robots.txt. I've claimed these subdomains and requested permanent removal, but it appears that after a certain time period (6 months)? Google will re-index (and mark them as blocked by robots.txt). What is the best way to permanently remove these from the index? We can't use login to block because our clients want to be able to view these applications without needing to login. What is the next best solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Moving some content to a new domain - best practices to avoid duplicate content?
Hi We are setting up a new domain to focus on a specific product and want to use some of the content from the original domain on the new site and remove it from the original. The content is appropriate for the new domain and will be irrelevant for the original domain and we want to avoid creating completely new content. There will be a link between the two domains. What is the best practice for this to avoid duplicate content and a potential Panda penalty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Citybase0 -
Best practice for listings with outbound links
My site contains a number of listings for charities that offer various sporting activities for people to get involved in order to raise money. As part of the listing we provide an outbound link for the user to find out more info about each of the charities and their activities. Currently these listings are blocked in the robots.txt for fear that we may be viewed as a 'link farm or spam site' (as there are hundreds of charities listed on the scrolling page) but these links out are genuine and provide benefits and are a useful resource for the user and not paid links. What I'd like to do is make these listings fully crawlable and indexable to increase our search traffic to these listing, but I'm not sure whether this would have a negative impact on our Pagerank with Google potentially viewing all these outbound links as 'bad' or 'paid links', Would removing the listing pages from our robots.txt and making all the outbound links 'nofollow' be the way forward to allow us to properly index the listings without being penalised as some kind of link farm or spam site? (N.B. I have no interest in passing link juice to the external charity websites)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
Will an RSS feed help new product get indexed? How to create one for product?
Hi I've read that creating an RSS feed for one of our ecommerce sites will help the products get indexed faster. Currently it takes google 4-5 days to index our new products, we want to speed that up. Will an RSS feed of the new products we have help? How do you create an RSS feed for this? Our blog gets indexed within minutes, but our main website, 4 days. Help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0