8 replies to this topic

[VetoFunk]

Hi,

I have been looking at whether our canonical urls are set up correctly. We have a Magento site and I noticed it the same set up for other Magento sites as well. I am guessing it's default. I just don't know if it's correct.

Let say you have a category on your website with 10 pages of products (10 products to a page). Right now, all the Magento sites I have found show the canonical url the same way:

<link href="http://www.domain.co...m/bluecategory" rel="canonical" />

...and this is on every page within the category. Is this right? I would think that every page within that category would be different. Something like:

<link href="http://www.domain.co...bluecategory-1" rel="canonical" />
<link href="http://www.domain.co...bluecategory-2" rel="canonical" />
<link href="http://www.domain.co...bluecategory-3" rel="canonical" />

Doesn't having <link href="http://www.domain.co...m/bluecategory" rel="canonical" /> on every page within a category just say only spider the information on that first page?

Am I looking at this correctly?

Thanks,

Jeff

[Jill]

Yes you are correct.

[VetoFunk]

Wow...so all these Magento sites are set up incorrectly? There are some big time sites doing this...ouch.

Ok...I will look to set it up this way:

<link href="http://www.domain.co...bluecategory-1" rel="canonical" />
<link href="http://www.domain.co...bluecategory-2" rel="canonical" />
<link href="http://www.domain.co...bluecategory-3" rel="canonical" />

[Jill]

It's possible that there are reasons why they (or you) might want it that way. It depends on what's on those deeper category pages.

[VetoFunk]

Hey Jill,

What do you think is the best way to handle the canonical url issue with a site like this? Right now we have the canonical url as a ?limt=all, which guarantees the search engine sees all the pages, but the issue is when there is 300+ products, it takes a long time for that to load.

Is it better to not even use a canonical url and just "no follow" all the sorting dropwdowns that the site has (aka best sellers, alpahbetical, by price...etc). I just want to cut down on the duplicate content (pages within a category) without stopping the search engines from reaching the deeper pages within a category.

I might be overthinking this, but just want to figure out the best way.

Here is an example page:
bestpricenutrition.com/allmax-nutrition.html

Thank you!

[Jill]

Why would rel=canonical make anything load slower?

[anandmistry]

Hey Jill, What do you think is the best way to handle the canonical url issue with a site like this? Right now we have the canonical url as a ?limt=all, which guarantees the search engine sees all the pages, but the issue is when there is 300+ products, it takes a long time for that to load. Is it better to not even use a canonical url and just "no follow" all the sorting dropwdowns that the site has (aka best sellers, alpahbetical, by price...etc). I just want to cut down on the duplicate content (pages within a category) without stopping the search engines from reaching the deeper pages within a category. I might be overthinking this, but just want to figure out the best way. Here is an example page: bestpricenutrition.com/allmax-nutrition.html Thank you!

I want to jump on this discussion because, I have similar issue with Rel=Canonical tag. I have implemented following canonical tag to all sorting pages, narrow by search pages and pagination. But, Google was crawling and indexing certain pages so, I have removed Rel=Canonical from website and use NOINDEX Follow meta robots.

Now, I am facing big issue with rank drop and traffic drop. I am really worry with canonical implementaion and what should I do with my website which help me to recover my ranking and traffic.

This is my first post so, I don't want to drop my URL here... because, it may be oppose to policy. You can see my website by profile and visit office chairs page to know more.

[Jill]

If you have noindex on pages of course you'll lose direct search traffic for those pages.

[VetoFunk]

I didn't mean the canonical would make things slower, but because we have the "limit=all" as part of the canonical. So what it's telling Google is look at the everything in the category. So let's say a category has 300 products, when someone clicks into that category from Google, they have to wait for 300 products to load up...depending on their Internet speed, it can take awhile.

Bascially I am trying to figure out the best way to handle categories with mutliple subpages and muliple sorting options.

Make more sense?