Proper structure for site with multiple catagories of same products

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Hi, we have products (trophies and awards) that can be catagorized in many ways. Using Award Medals as an example: - Medals by type: 1 1/2", 2", etc. - Medals by sport Baseball, Basketball, Cheer - Medals by Style Color, Gold, Silver, Bronze Right now, we have an Award Medals section off of our home page. The section has a decent page rank, but should be much better (I think). My guess is that we are loosing page range since we have separate sections with the groups above as we want our customers to be able to find the medals easily. Unfortunately, when we setup our site 10 years ago, we organized by type and this is what is hanging off the home page. The other groupings we added more recently. I have attached a snap shot of what the sections look like. We would like customers to find an individual medal when they do a Google search. For example a search for Baseball Medals. In Goggle, they likely would not search for 1 1/2" medals. My question is this: Can we keep the same structure we have today (to enable customer flexibility) but improve page rank and also have the sections like basball medals rank well? I have thought about using canonical tags, but the pages are not the same - in one case it is all baseball medals, in another it is all 1 1/2" medals, etc. Thanks for your help!!

[AlanBleiweiss]

I get this same issue a lot - just about or nearly every time I'm hired to perform a forensic audit on an ecommerce site...

Here's how I responded in one of my recent audits to this question:

Search engines struggle to then determine “which of these two nearly identical pages is the original source, which is more authoritative, and which is merely an attempt to own two positions in search results for the same company.

Sometimes search engines overcome that struggle in a positive way, other times their automated systems fail miserably. More often than not, on an initial look, you don’t even realize how much of a problem it is if you think you’re doing well in your organic search based visits.

In reality, every page that competes with every other page results in a cannibalization effect. Every page suffers, at least a little, and cumulatively, entire sites suffer way more than you might even comprehend.

Solutions for consideration:

1. Keep all copies of each product but make them unique. If they are kept, every version or instance of a product needs to have its content completely re-written so that it is truly unique compared to every other instance.

2. Keep all copies of each product but decide which ones you want the search engines to find and rank - every other version should be blocked from indexing.  Do not rely on Google to figure out which to keep and which to rank and which to not.

3. Eliminate as many copies as possible by considering consolidation of products detail pages while maintaining access to them from multiple categories.  301 Redirect all copies of every version of those product details pages except the primary one you intend to keep indexed and ranked in search engines.

There's a lot more to consider such as canonical implementation, however in addition to the issue with canonical you already described, the fact is that canonical tags are only signals. they are NOT directives, so that's relying on Google to figure it out.

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Thanks, Alan.  This makes sense.  One question on #3 - the 301 redirect:

Assume I have a page, say medals1 and aonther page medals2 - both with similar and essentially pointing to many of the same products.

If I do a 301 redirect from medals2 to medals1, is that only an instruction to the search engines, or will someone on my site on the medals2 page see something different?

Thank!

[AlanBleiweiss]

a 301 redirect is a server level or site level command to a web browser to jump to the page the redirect is pointing to.  A canonical tag within a page is only a signal to a search engine to not count / index this page, but count/index the page in the canonical tag.

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Thanks, Alan, I understand now...