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
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
-
Is a short URL path stronger than a long one for an eshop?
Hello Moz Fans ! I'm building an eshop website and reviewing a few competitors website I found something interesting on which I don't have the full answer. Will it be better for me to organize the products in sub folder or in the root folder (option 1 or option 2) _Competitor link _shop.com/en/2628-buy-key-origin-the-sims-4-seasons/ Option 1 - Normal organization _+ _We can add relevant KW in /products/ product url will be one folder deep more home/ home/category/ (category page) home/category/subcategory1 home/category/subcategory2 home/products (this page does not exist really) home/products/product1 home/products/product2 Option 2 - less folders _+ _We can add all KW in the link directly it may be less organize for Google home/ home/category/ (category page) home/category/subcategory1 home/category/subcategory2 home/product1 (all product in the direct folders) home/product2
Technical SEO | | kh-priyam0 -
SEO advice on ecommerce url structure where categories contain "/c/"
Hi! We use Hybris as plattform and I would like input on which url to choose. We must keep "/c/" before the actual category. c stands for category. I.e. this current url format will be shortened and cleaned:
Technical SEO | | hampgunn
https://www.granngarden.se/Sortiment/Husdjur/Hund/Hundfoder-%26-Hundmat/c/hundfoder To either: a.
https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/hundfoder/c/hundfoder b.
https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/c/hundfoder (hundfoder means dogfood) The question is whether we should keep the duplicated category name (hundfoder) before the "/c/" or not. Will there be SEO disadvantages by removing the duplicate "hundfoder" before the "/c/"? I prefer the shorter version ofc, but do not want to jeopardize any SEO rankings or send confusing signals to search engines or customers due to the "/c/" breaking up the url breadcrumb. What do you guys say and prefer from the above alternatives? Thanks /Hampus0 -
Help: domain name change and Google News
Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?
Technical SEO | | christyrobinson1 -
Should we remove category paths for better SEO?
We're looking to build some serious content and capitalise on long-tail keyword traffic for our sub-category pages, example for targeted keyword "designer dining tables". Example of current link: www.website.com/designer-furniture/designer-dining-tables.html Would removing the category paths help? Example result - www.website.com/designer-dining-tables More user friendly URLs and better for SEO would you suggest? The only problem is, if we removed the paths would this have a hit on our traffic? Any advice would be much appreciated. We are using Magento platform.
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
How to keep a URL social equity during a URL structure/name change?
We are in the process of making significant URL name/structure change to one of our property and we want to keep the social equity (likes, share, +1, tweets) from the old to the new URL. We have been trying many different option without success. We are running our social "button" in an iframe. Thanks
Technical SEO | | OlivierChateau0 -
H-tags and Page Name best practice
For the past few months I've been working on a new site launch, but have been left with a couple of annoyances from my predecessor.. I've got a couple of questions about best practise (and if it's worth changing now). For reference, a good example page is http://polestars.net/hen-party/life-drawing-hen-party/ H-tags The (external) web designer has insisted that wrapping the logo in an H1 tag (with the same branded H1 text on every page), and using an H2 for the actual title of the page is fine. I really don't believe him, but at the same time, feel like maybe google is smart enough to discern the theme of a page in this structure. Is it worth having this changed so that the actual title is the first H1? Page naming convention Another annoyance that I've been left with is the fact that every product page is named the same "burlesque hen party", "life drawing hen party", "whatever hen party"... It looks a little weird, but my real concern is that as we now have 60 "hen party" links in the navigation menu of a bunch of our pages, this may be seen as keyword stuffing - is this a real concern, or am I overthinking it?
Technical SEO | | AlecPR0 -
Multi-Word-Keyphrase in domain name wo/ or with dashes?
SEO Gurus, There seems to be a tendency that whenever you need to optimize a project for a multi-word key phrase, lets say for example "hostels in boston" SEOs see it as a best practice to refelct the key phrase in the domain without dashes yet when being used in a directory/page name context dashers are being used? Does anyone have any experience to share on this topic what works better? From my experience using dashes has been quite successful in the past but I am questioning this approach for a new project I am about to start. To clarify the question, in your eyes what would work better for the keyphrase "hotels in boston" www.hotelsinboston.com www.hotels-in-boston.com Thanks /Thomas
Technical SEO | | tomypro0 -
Should I Block Tag, Category, Author Pages
Just finished reviewing the first crawl of my first SEOmoz campaign for a site that I am working on. The site I"m working on uses Wordpress as a CMS, and most if not all of the warnings and notices have to do with author, category, and tag pages. Should I block these from being indexed? Why or why not?
Technical SEO | | Falconberg0