URL path randomly changing
-
Hi eveyone,
got a quick question about URL structures:
I'm currently working in ecommerce with a site that has hundreds of products that can be accessed through different URL paths:
2)www.domain.com/category/productx
3)www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx
4)www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx
5)...
In order to get rid of dublicate content issues, the canoncial tag has been installed on all the pages required. The problem I'm witnessing now is the following:
If a visitor comes to the site and navigates to the product through example 2) at time the URL shown in the URL browser box is example 4), sometimes example 1) or whatever. So it is constantly changing.
Does anyone know, why this happens and if it has any impact on GA tracking or even on SEO peformance.
Any reply is much appreciated
Thanks you
-
If that was the final product page, then yes, you should be using a standard htacess rewrite command to ensure that the final product urls are always www.domain.com/productx But in saying that, the way you had it is totally fine if all the other url possibilities have a canonical tag that points back to optimised version (original product url - www.domain.com/productx)
The htacess rewrite it's not something you should be handling manually. Magento has that option inbuilt into it. It would be a fair amount of work if you had to do that manually. and I would just run with the canonical option if that were the case. Any good eCommerce platform should have the inbuilt ability to automatically remove the category folders and other search queries from the final product url.
Sometimes it's ok to leave the category folders in the url, it just depends on the products being sold. Below would be an example where I would leave the category folders in the url if I was selling different colored soccer balls.
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/black-white/
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/blue-white/
www.sports.com/soccer-balls/red-yellow/ -
Hi Richard,
thanks a lot for your reply.
Let me clarify: productx is a final product page (not a category page with a variety of products). This means that my productx page basically corresponds to your /final-product example.
According to your post and the htaccess command mention, I assume, that it does not cause problems, if the URL shown in the browser does not correspond to the one, the user actually took?
So no matter if a customer comes to the final product page through 1) 2) 3) 4). The URL shown could always be 1) and thats fine. Is that what you ment?
Thanks in advance
-
Those paths all seem fine as they are all legitimate ways of getting to that bunch of products. I'm also assuming that the final page on each of the below urls is a page that contains a selection of products and you can still click on an individual product from the list and go to its url.
1)www.domain.com/productx
2)www.domain.com/category/productx
3)www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx
4)www.domain.com/bestsellers/productxIt's even debatable whether you need canonical tags on any of those above urls, it all depends on how different those pages are from each other with regards to the content on the page before the products. If all of those above urls had different H1 tags and different content before the product feed then they are all stand alone legitimate pages that don't need canonical tags. But if they're all virtually the same and not much customization has been done to the auto generated pages then yes, they should all have a canonical tag back to www.domain.com/productx perhaps, or the most suitable page.
A bigger issue I think you may have is the url of the final single product page. It shouldn't be like this:
www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx/final-product/
or like this either:
www.domain.com/bestsellers/productx/final-product/Optimally, it should read like this no matter how the visitor got there:
www.domain.com/final-product/In most cases, for optimal Seo, an extension, plugin, or htaccess command should rewrite the final product url to strip out all of the category url paths or best seller url paths from the urls so your final product page url is short and clean like this: www.domain.com//final-product/ even though the path is really ths: www.domain.com/category/subcategory/productx/final-product/
It's pretty hard to tell what the optimal solution for your site is without having a look at it and understanding your product range and categorization a bit better, but I hope that helps a bit.
-
Thanks for your reply Hector,
The way, the pages are structured on our site is the way 99% of ecommerce business have them structured so that is not the issue here. It's more the path itself that concerns me a bit.
Cheers,
-
It is a technical issue with your ecommerce platform. Definitely it is not good to have that kind of different URLs.
Canonicals are helpful with pages where you cannot do anything but having two similar pages on your site, or when there are almost identical pages. But when dealing with such an important page on an Internet project like the product page on a ecommerce site, you should definitely take action and manage to have unique URLs for every product, not depending of the path the visitor follows to reach that page.
It will become difficult to measure conversion rates or any other KPI on Analytics, and also will become a problem in SEO, with so many different pages to link.
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
-
URL Parameters to Ignore
Hi Mozers, **We have a glossary of terms made up of a main page that lists out ALL of the terms, and then individual pages per alphabet letter that limit the results to that specific alphabet letter. These pages look like this: ** https://www.XXXX.XXX/publications/dictionaries/XXX-terms?expand=A https://www.XXXX.XXX/publications/dictionaries/XXX-terms?expand=B https://www.XXXX.XXX/publications/dictionaries/XXX-terms?expand=C https://www.XXXX.XXX/publications/dictionaries/XXX-terms?expand=D etc. If I'd like Google to remove all of these "expand=" pages from the index, such that only the main page is indexed, what is the exact parameter that I should ask Google to ignore in Search Console? "expand=" ? Just want to make sure! Thanks for the help!!!
Technical SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Usage of keywords in URL
Hi everyone, I'm trying to optimize our website and I'm not sure what's ideal for our URL structure. We have two products: one of them is focused on B2C & the other one on B2B.
Technical SEO | | Klouwers
Our homepage is focused on the B2C product. For our B2B product, I'm not sure what's ideal. The URL for our 'homepage' of the B2B product is ourdomain.com/software. We have different target groups for our B2B software, and therefore different pages on our website. Which URL would be best to use for the keyword personal trainer software?
1. ourdomain.com/software/personal-trainer-software
2. ourdomain.com/software/personal-trainer0 -
Keyword Phrase in URL structure
Wondered the best URL structure, to include a major keyword phrase. Our clients' case is that their domain name is not the main keyword. So should we include the keyword phrase in the URL structure to list all their office locations: A - www.website.com/anxiety-treatment/denver/1001
Technical SEO | | ErnieB
or
B - www.website.com/denver/1001 Would this be considered keyword stuffing? We'd like "A" above to rank for keyword phrases related to "anxiety treatment denver", etc.0 -
Change E-commerce Plataform... redirect urls... and images?
we are changing the e-commerce store and usually we do the redirection of all pages URLs... We usually don´t redirect css, js and images files .... Shouldn´t we redirect images as well?
Technical SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
When to use canonical urls
I will be the first to admit I am never really 100% sure when to use canonical urls. I have a quick question and I am not really sure if this is a situation for a canonical or not. I am looking at a my friends building website and there are issues with what pages are ranking. Basically there homepage is focusing on the building refurbishment location but for some reason in internal page is ranking for that keyword and it is not mentioned at all on that page. Would this be a time to add the homepage url and a canonical on the ranking page (using yoast plugin) to tell Google that the homepage is the preferred page? Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | propertyhunter0 -
Would you shorten this url, and if so how?
I designed the structure of my website way before I even thought about SEO. I run a website that requires me to categorize articles is somewhat deep nested categories so an example url would be as follows http://www.yakangler.com/articles/news/new-products/boats/item/1442-jackson-kayak-launches-the-big-tuna Would you shorten the url to somethign like this? http://www.yakangler.com/a/n/np/b/item/1442-jackson-kayak-launches-the-big-tuna If so how would you manage the redirects I'm unsure how to add a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file that wouldn't require me to add one for every single article. Could I do it with a rule that recognizes only the middle part of the url and redirect it accordingly? Thanks for any advice you might have!
Technical SEO | | mr_w0 -
Changing E Commerce platforms
Hey All, Im Olga and new to search engine optimization and web development. I recently changed from O S Commerce to Go daddy Quick shopping Cart. Before on my old site I had a lot of images show up on google searches on the first page in the image section that have recently vanished due to the change. I think that is where the majority of my sales were coming from as I did not really rank for any keyword searches. My old web designer did everything for my old site and told me a year ago he was to busy to help me out anymore and I did not know how to work OS Commerce hence the change to quick shopping cart. Does anyone know how to get images back into google images, or any other beginner strategies to help me rank in google. I have used all of the tools on this program and pretty much got everything figured out only I think the industry I am in is VERY competitive. Would love any advice or help. Thanks, Olga Girls Gone Biker
Technical SEO | | girlsgonebiker0 -
Frequent server changes
Hey guys. I have a server related question. One of our websites is hosted with a nasty slow company, and we want to make a change. The problem we have is that the site is 6 months old so it started on one server, the client then moved it to this slow host about 2 months ago, we now want to move it again. Will this negatively affect search engine rankings? As ever, thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nextman0