ECommerce categories in path name or alternative
-
Our store is in magento and many recommend to turn of category names in product paths as magento creates duplicate pages for the same content when products are in multiple categories. I have a canonical plugin that should fix dup paths.
This has not bothered me until I decided to create GA goals for seeing multiple products and realized I dont have an easy filter because the paths dont have categories.
I think I can add a suffix to products like /?t=p - If I can do so will that be enough for me to create goals in GA - or am I better off adding back category paths.
-
Per Svanstrom,
This is a great way of thinking of it and you answer makes a lot of sense to me.
In case someone finds this later looking for Magento Category advice - what you see in many magento seo posts is to not use categories in the path due poor native canonical handling especially when products end up in multiple category paths. It seems a lot better plan to follow the functionality advice of Per's post and just fix the canonical problems in the design or by adding an extension.
-
For me this is not about how you want your structure and not trying to change a structure to meet your analytics needs. Analytics can be set to handle any structure you choose, even if it can take some tweeking of the installation of the script, but In my experience, you allways have to do a custom installation of Analytics to get what you want anyhow.
So the question should rather be, should you have category paths in your urls or not and that is a much tougher questions.
First, we need to understand that the shorter URLs you can have, but still have good "readability" for the user, the better it is, but you still want to have a good structure for inbound linking.
I think, to make this fairly complex issue more simple I would say, that if you run content at your category pages, with the possibility to shop products and display of campaign information, then you really need to have the category in your URL.
This is because you want the user to be able to just delete the product in the url after finding it in Google to get to the category of that product. For inbound linking its also nice to have a clear and nice category in the URL.
On the other hand, if you dont have content on your category pages, then I woulnd't display them in the URL, mostly for the same, but oppositie, reason as above and as you get shorter URLs
You should not add parameters to your URLs if you dont need them.
If you still go ahead with parameters, just make sure you add link-cannonical to point on the none parameter url, to prevent duplicate urls of the same products
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
-
Using Temporary Redirects for Ecommerce Categories?
Hi I'm currently going over old category pages for an ecommerce website, and I'm trying to work out the best way of handling old pages. I will be setting up 301s for the majority of pages, as these are 100% dead and gone. I'm struggling a bit with certain pages though, whereby the category is empty but there is always the possibility that our buyers will purchase these products again in the future (or they might not, there's no way to tell). I know that this isn't what a 302 is for, but I'm wondering which would be better in this case: to create a 302 redirect or to do a full 301 and if the products are repurchased at a later date to create a whole new url. Hope that makes sense. Thanks, Kate
Technical SEO | | Lisaangel0 -
Static or dynamic category pages for seo
Hi, I'm developing an accommodation site with a limited number of properties in 8 categories. I had been looking at making the properties blog posts and then using category function to show lists but its going to require a lot of customisation and I have seo concerns about the dynamic content as the category page is crucial. As I don't have a lot to add and listings will remain the same my latest thought was to create all as pages. However if I create a page with a list of 12 properties on a category page is there anyway of adding some sorting criteria to that page (would be 7 options - swimming pool, near beach, on site creche, budget, mid-range, luxury) Thanks for any tips Neil
Technical SEO | | neilhenderson0 -
Two Dentists, Same Address, Same Phone, Different Business Names
Hi Everyone, I've been looking into this situation for quite a while, but most posts/information on this topic seem to be from at least 1-2 years ago. I'm currently working with a dentist who just moved into the same suite as another dentist who has been working there for years. They each have the same address and same suite number, the same phone number, but each own their own respective practice and have their own patients. To make things even more complicated, the dentist that has been working there for years uses his name as a business name, while the new dentist has a business name differing from her actual name. I'm not exactly sure how to go about optimizing the new dentist's local presence, but the only thing I can think of doing is try to recommend having the suite split into Suite #-A and Suite #-B and seeing if it's possible to add a second phone number for the new dentist. Please let me know your thoughts, and if you've seen this topic come up in the past, I would love to get pointed in the right direction. Thanks for all your help!
Technical SEO | | abnovak1 -
Massive Nonsensical 301 on Large ecommerce Site
We are in the process of launching a large ecommerce site, which is a rebuild. Their old URL structure does not make it possible in our eyes to logically map every URL to it's corresponding new page. We have done our best to properly and manually redirect all pages that were receiving any amount of organic traffic and have also covered all pages that had external links. Our question is we will end up with potentially tens of thousands of 404 errors that will never fix themselves. The manual work will need to stop at some point. Would it be better to leave these 404's the way they are and just let them fall out of the index or should we take everything we cannot assign appropriately to a page like the products root or the home page? I'm also open to hearing any suggestions about how others have solved massive nonsensical 301's. Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | Bevelwise0 -
How can i do SEO For Ecommerce site
I am doing SEO for my WP blog but now I am starting my recently launch an eCommerce site where I am selling electronics products. I want to know how can I do the SEO so at least I can top 10 position for my google India. Second how can i avoid duplicate content about copying manufacture contents. Please help
Technical SEO | | chandubaba0 -
H1 - site name or page title?
Hi all, I have always used h1 tags for the site name and then h2 tags for the page title, thus: Bob's Chunky Bacon Store Smoked Bacon Bacon bacon bacon bacon etc... My reasoning for this is I believe it is semantically correct. The h1 represents a book's title and the h2 the name of a chapter. I seem to have read, in a few places, that my h1 should be the page title: Bob's Chunky Bacon Store Smoked Bacon Bacon bacon bacon bacon etc... From a SEO view, which of these is the better approach? Thanks in advance for any input.
Technical SEO | | jimneath0 -
For Google + purposes, should the author's name appear in the Meta description or title tag of my web site just as you would your key search phrase?
Relative to Cyrus Shepard's article on January 4th regarding Google's Superior SEO strategy, if I'm the primary author of all blog articles and web site content, and I have a link showing authorship going back to Google Plus, is a site wide link from the home page enough or should that show up on all blog posts etc and editorial comment pages etc? Conversely, should the author's name appear in the Meta description or title tag of my web site just as you would your key search phrase since Google appears to be trying to make a solid connection with my name, and all content?
Technical SEO | | lwnickens0 -
Ranking Implications due to Altering Page Names
I'm working on a very large (over 2500 pages), very old website (with pages created in the late 90s). The structure of the site is a mess (it still shows subtle sings of Frontpage!). We are trying to move to a more uniform, dynamic solution. My question is: what sort of implication will there be on search rankings if we implement 301 redirects from the very old pages (that are poorly named) to new pages which follow a uniform pattern. Some of these pages have external links pointing to them and others (most) just have internal links pointing to them which will be adjusted to the new urls. Does the age of the page have a significant implication on rankings? Is there a better way to this than 301 redirects? Thanks for the help
Technical SEO | | Bartell0