ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?
-
We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site.
Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category.
This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product.
So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content?
Is this the best way?
-
Site is still in testing but as an example the products are for cars and the same product can fit multiple cars, hence why it may be in more than one place
-
Short answer: using rel="canonical" to point to the default URL for each product will solve the product-related duplicate content issue.
As for the "best" way to solve this problem, I actually prefer using a robots meta tag with "noindex, follow" attributes on each duplicate product page.
Since the duplicate URLs only exist for navigational purposes, I'd prefer to keep them out of the search engine indexes altogether.
Once you have this issue squared away, be sure to read through these resources for other important eCommerce considerations:
-
Another option i thought of would be that the other pages I simply add a no index meta tag to so it only indexes the one url.
The reason I say this as from experience of how seomoz crawls sites and some pages which i know are not duplicate content yet i have had many pages for many sites get tagged for duplicate content simply because there isn't enough of a difference on the page.
The product pages wouldb e very much the same as really all that would be different is the breadcrumb trail and possibly some other links 95% of the pages would be the same as they are the same product.
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
-
Best Practices for Homepage Title Tag
Hi, I would like to know if there is any update about the best practices for the homepage title tag. I mean, a couple of years ago, it was still working placing main keywords in the homepage title tag. But since the last google SERP update, the number of characters that are being shown were reduced, and now we try to work with 55 and 56 characters. That has reduced our capacity of including many keywords on the title tag. Besides, search engines are smarter now to choose the correct inner page to show in SERP. But I am wondering if the Homepage Title should have a branded orientation or should include main keywords, cause it is still working that strategy. I would appreciatte any update in this issue. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
International SEO, Ecommerce & Rich Snippets
I have an Australian Ecommerce site. I also sell to NZ and USA . As part of the user experience it will detect where you are and change the currency accordingly. so when google crawls - the currency will always be USD I guess ( because it is a US IP address ). My question - how can I embed ecommerce microdata that will show the correct currency / price to the correct country in SERPS ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Shopify and multiple stores for seo
Hi, We have a potential client who has multiple stores targeting different countries using Shopify. He has set the domains for specific countries using geo targeting in webmaster tools. Anybody had any experience on how fool proof this is? (all the sites have the exact same products/content on them) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OnlineAssetPartners0 -
Best E-commerce CMS from a SEO perspective
Hello fellow mozzers, I have a lot of experience with Magento and a little bit of experience with Prestashop and i am quite aware of their strengths and weaknesses regarding SEO. I was wondering which E-commerce CMS is the best for SEO. I am talking about the CMS as you download it. There are hundreds of plugins for the popular systems which improve their SEO power tremendously, but i'm interested in which CMS is the best right out-of-the-box. Let me know what you think and why you think so. Thanks in advance 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WesleySmits1 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Ok to use rich snippets for same product on multiple pages?
I am developing a new set of pages for a series of products which exist on separate sub domains linked to the root domain. The product pages on the sub domains have rich snippets; review count, review score etc. The new pages im building out are for the same products though on the root domain and with different content. Im not comfortable marking those pages up with rich snippets too given they will have the same review counts, scores etc though would like to if its viable? Any thoughts/opinions? Thanks, Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Setting a 404, best practices
Is it enough to just delete a page, or is it necessary to do something else to 404 a page correctly? Is there a great link to explain how to set http status codes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
What are the best joomla seo plugins?
When optimizing a joomla site what is the best plugins etc for seo tweeking
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0