Indexing an e-commerce site

[jenga11]

Hi all,

My client babyblingstreet.com. She sells baby and toddler clothing. Now a lot of the links on her site contain the same products. For instance: if you go to "What's new" you can find those same products in let's say her "Sale Items" link category.

The real problem with this is let's say my client sells a green dress and someone accesses it through the "baby and toddler dresses" category. And let's say this URL has 10 links pointing to it. Now, let's say someone else accesses this same green dress through the "What's new" category. And let's say this particular URL has 10 links pointing to it. Instead of having 20 links pointing to one URL about the green dress, I now have 10 links pointing to one URL and 10 pointing to another URL even though both URLs feature the exact same green dress.

In this particular example I would want to make the URL of the green dress in the "baby and toddler clothing" section be the canonical URL. So that means I would have to use this canonical tag on the green dress URL that's in the "what's new" category and let's say also the "sale items" category. This could get very tedious if my client has 200+ products. So I am wondering if I have to place a canonical tag on every URL that displays the green dress?

More importantly, I would like to know other people's strategies for indexing e-commerce sites that have the same product featured in multiple categories throughout the site.

I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time.

[Francisco_Meza]

If you are using Magento Commerce, just select the option in Config.

If you are using something else, then you may need a plugin.

Any eCommerce software should have already run into this problem a couple years ago.

[edwardlewis]

how do you manage to pick up clients without having an understanding of how to optimise their site? seems a bit odd

[activitysuper]

You must be able to dynamically code the canonical tags into those 'new products'.

The really question is why have you got 2 pages? Surely you have a link in the cat and a link in the new products section linking to the same page.

[Dr-Pete]

It may be tedious, but you need to do it, one way or another. Theoretically, these product duplicates could be severely harming your client's ranking ability.

Practically, I'm not seeing much evidence, though, of these duplicate paths or duplicate products in the Google index. I am seeing other duplicate pages, like search results and https: versions of your product pages. You have a few canonicalization issues going on.

Ideally, no matter what category path, you'll land on one URL. The very small usability consequences of the path change (in my experience, at least) are far outweighed by the risks of spinning off dozens of duplicates. As @activitysuper said, there should be a way to do this dynamically - you're changing a couple of templates, not individual product pages.

I would have to see the duplicate product URLs in action, though. I'm not finding that specific problem.

[jenga11]

How do you claim to be part of a community when all you offer is criticisms and for that matter complete ignorance? Do me a favor and never waste my time with such an ignorant response again. You know nothing about me, my client or the background of the situation.

[jenga11]

Thank you for your well-informed response, Peter. You are right, though it is tedious, I still have to do it.

In regards to product duplicates severely harming my client's ability to rank, I am not quite sure if that's true. Google has wrote extensive material about duplicate content and how it's a myth that it affects ranking. I am not quite sure how truthful that is, but here's a link to one of those articles:

http://www.spottedpanda.com/2011/seo-news/confirmed-seo-facts-matt-cutts/

As for not seeing the duplicate product URLs in action, that's simply because the site is ground-floor. I inherited this project about a month and a half-ago from a design company who only built her a beautiful site. They did not optimize one thing for her. What's worse is that they used this heavily, technically involved cart software called ProductCart. The cart uses .Asp technology, which I am not sure if you aware of this, but many servers aren't built anymore to handle this legacy coding format.

The real problem I am facing, per @activitysuper response, is that the link in the cat is the same the as the link in products section. What I am saying is that there's a completely different cat that also has that same product but with a different URL.

You are both right, this is probably something I can remedy on the server-side. I was just merely throwing this out there to determine how other SEOs deal with having the same product in multiple categories.

Thanks for your time.

[Dr-Pete]

This is one area where I am 99.99999% confident saying that Google's past statements are incorrect and even irresponsible. Panda is, in many ways, an assault on thin content, and duplicates are worse than thin. I've seen many large-scale sites take massive hits from duplicates (as much as 80% traffic loss).

The "myth" is that duplicate content causes a Capital-P Penalty, but Google uses a very narrow and self-serving definition of that term. Duplicate content does not cause a manual penalty and they probably don't consider Panda to be a penalty internally at Google. However, the consequences are very severe.

Even before Panda, I saw cases studies where reducing duplicate content greatly improved rankings. I had a client whose "product" pages (it was an event site) were being filtered out due to massive duplication. Once we fixed the problem, their search traffic tripled over the course of 3 months. This was well before May Day and Panda (2007, if memory serves). Today, it's 10X worse.

When you get into e-commerce, the problem is almost inevitable and needs to be managed. Now, does that mean that you're currently facing ranking issues, Panda, etc.? No, not necessarily. You have less than 2K indexed pages, which is hardly excessive. If each product page has one duplicate, and you know that can't spin out of control, the consequences are limited. Still, you're diluting your ranking ability to some extent. I think it's well worth addressing the problem and being proactive.

[jenga11]

I think you're right. Again, thanks for the well-informed response. I will take a lot of what you have just said into consideration. I also side with you about the duplicate issues. I may be a bit cynical here, but I have always found it hard to believe that Google will ever give us the complete truth.