Canonical tag for similar page with different theme.

[josh-att]

Our commerce system allows products to be shared across multiple categories/sections of our site. E.G.

/boxes/blue-box.html

/circles/blue-box.html

This enables the product to show up in different areas of the site, but does not link to an evergreen URL. We are considering using the canonical tag to resolve this issue, but our question relates to the similarity of the pages.

Each section folder (e.g. /boxes/ and /circles/) has a different header, left navigation and footer. They are similar in layout and some content is the same, but a good portion is different in the header and nav. Each category nav basically deals with deeper links in it's own category.

The product title, image, description, etc. is all the same and makes up the bulk of the page. Is this a good candidate for the canonical tag or should we attempt to accommodate an evergreen URL?

[Nick_Ker]

I would use canonical in this situation. That way you won't have to rework all your navigation to have a single url for each product and can keep your category structures intact.

This is a situation that many eCommerce platforms really don't handle well.  For example, I know of one that claims to offer canonical for product pages, but it gives each version (boxes/product.html and circles/product.html) its own unique canonical tag rather than both referring to the same product.html page. Kind of misses the point.

[AlanMosley]

SE's can tell(for the most part) what is your content what is your header and what is your nav and footer, when looking for duplicate content, tehy are not concerned about the nav footer and header, they are concerned with your content.

[josh-att]

The canonical would be the quickest to implement for us, but the evergreen URL wouldn't be a huge deal to implement either after we took a look at it. Is there an advantage to one versus the other?

[Nick_Ker]

One static URL that can be found by your users from within any of the categories that the product is in would probably be best. That way there is no chance of duplicate content issues if the search engines were to find both and not resolve the canonical tag.

Really, I think it could go either way. Whichever one is easiest to implement in your particular situation, unless there are a lot of inbound links to your products. If that is the case, changing the URLs would require 301 redirects from the old URLs.