A Magento site driving me crazy... any suggestion is appreciated
-
Hi guys,
this time it's me asking for help :D.
I have a client with a Magento 1.7.0.0 version site: www.mybomboniere.it
I audited it, and found out tons of issues, but the one that worries me more is the fault of canonicalization, which is causing serious duplicated content problems.
I'm not new to Magento, hence, the first thing I did was going to:
First: Going to System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization and setting on "No" the Use Categories Path for Product URLs voice. Doing so I quit all the duplicated product pages.
System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization and setting on "yes" the voices Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories and Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products.
Doing this I should see URLs with sort parameters having the URLs without them as canonical
The BIG PROBLEM is that even if I did that, I am still not seeing any rel="canonical" tag added to the code. I've tried to figure out the reason of this, but - sincerely - I cannot find one.
Secondly, the client created so many categories and subcategories that - honestly - the best thing would be to start cutting some of them. But one thing is what is correct in theory, another what the client desires, and she does not desire cutting any subcategory.
That means that some risk to be a substantial duplicate of others. The correct choice should be to canonicalized the overly identical subcategories to a main one... but this is not possible using the default Magento functions.So, or using an SEO extension (but, which one is the best for Magento 1.7.0.0.? Yoast plugins seem outdated), or using a solution like the second option proposed in this post: http://www.adurolabs.com/blog/technical/how-to-add-rel-canonical-in-magento.
The doubt is that the post is presenting it in case of products pages, not categories ones. Hence, is it correct also for them, or do you have others suggestions.
Sorry for the long question, but any help will be much appreciated :).
Ciao
Gianluca
-
Hi,
Following some testing, you can actually use the xml update feature for both categories and products individually, the trick is to first remove the existing rel=canonical that is put in if you have those settings turned on for that in the magento admin. So:
<reference name="head"><action method="removeItem"><type>link_rel</type>
<name>http://www.domain.com/oldurl</name></action></reference><action method="addLinkRel"><rel>canonical</rel>
<href>http://www.domain.com/new-url</href></action>You will need to identify the canonical url being inputted into the code, add it to the oldurl bit above and then put in the new url. You can do this in products and also for categories in the custom design tab and then the custom layout update box.
Hope that helps!
-
Hopefully you are nearly there with Lynn's advice but if you do go down the extension route I highly recommend this one: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/online-promotions-by-mirasvit-1211.html
-
Actually I take back that bit about the filtered urls. Just checked and indeed they should canonical back to the base category url, so if you find out why the canonical is not showing up you should be good
-
Hi Gianluca,
What an honour
For the product canonical meta tag you have set it up correctly, I assume you have cleared the magento cache, are you sure there is not a php cache/accelerator running also (like apc or similar)? This would also prevent the changes you have enabled from immediately showing up.
The second option in the link you mention will also work, but really the first option (which you are trying now) is more efficient and automatic as long as you do not have duplicate content across different products which ideally you wont. That being said it is worth trying the second option on your sub categories, I believe you can do custom layout updates at the category level also and that should help you!
One thing to clarify: You say you expect to see canonicals on urls with sort parameters, but in my experience you will not. I cannot think of a commercial seo module for magento off the top of my head that will handle correct canonical tags for search and filtering parameters. The easiest way to do it is some custom development work which is not that difficult to do if you find someone comfortable with Magento.
Hope that helps!
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
-
SEO audit for ccTLD sites
Hi.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOSanna
My customer has sites with Country code TLDs (e.g. https://sample.fr, https://sample.fi and https://sample.en) and I'm supposed to perform SEO audit for them. Is there any way to perform audit at the same time for all versions? Can I perform audit e.g. just for https://sample or do I have to run every .fr, .fi and .en separately in multiple tools I use? Thanks much in advance!0 -
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
How to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site
Hello, I've got a new Ecommerce site I'm jumpstarting. It's one of those sites that takes a while to rank for. Here's what we're doing: 1. Creating a beautiful, mobile friendly site. 2. Adding a long detailed home page answering all the questions that people come to our industry keyword results with. 3. Adding detailed, beautiful cateogy pages. 4. Adding detailed, beautiful product pages. 5. Adding beautiful, long About Us & Resource Sites list pages. 6. Offering straight up obvious free shipping and no tax even though that's taking a hit in our industry. 7. We're going after the 2 main informational terms (keyword explorer) in the industry with a vengance - 20X as good as the competition for the main term. 8. We're adding 20-30 pages of articles to help our customers and hit major keyword search terms, although there's not much in our industry. What else would you recommend doing to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site that has difficulty being in the top 50? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
1 Ecommerce site for several product segments or 1 Ecommerce site for each product segment ?
I am currently struggling with the decision whether to create individual ecommerce sites for each of 3 consumer product segments or rather to integrate them all under one umbrella domain. Obviously integration under 1 domain makes link building easier, but I am not sure how far google will favor in rankings websites focussed on one topic=product segment. Product segments are medium competitive.Product segments are not directly related but there may be some overlap in customer demographics- Any thoughts ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
301 from one site to another
I have two e-commerce websites and i'm going to remove some products from website as requested by a supplier and sell them only on one site. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect the pages from site 1 to site 2?? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Site revamp for neglected site - modifying site structure, URLs and content - is there an optimal approach?
A site I'm involved with, www.organicguide.com, was at one stage (long ago) performing reasonably well in the search engines. It was ranking highly for several keywords. The site has been neglected for some considerable period of time. A new group of people are interested in revamping the site, updating content, removing some of the existing content, and generally refreshing the site entirely. In order to go forward with the site, significant changes need to be made. This will likely involve moving the entire site across to wordpress. The directory software (edirectory.com) currently being used has not been designed with SEO in mind and as a result numerous similar pages of directory listings (all with similar titles and descriptions) are in google's results, albeit with very weak PA. After reading many of the articles/blog posts here I realize that a significant revamp and some serious SEO work is needed. So, I've joined this community to learn from those more experienced. Apart from doing 301 redirects for pages that we need to retain, is there any optimal way of removing/repairing the current URL structure as the site gets updated? Also, is it better to make changes all at once or is an iterative approach preferred? Many thanks in advance for any responses/advice offered. Cheers MacRobbo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | macrobbo0 -
Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0