What is the best canonical url to use for a product page?

[danielmoss]

I just helped a client redesign and launch a new website for their organic skin care company (www.hylunia.com). The site is built in Magento which by default creates MANY urls for each product. Which of these two do you think would be the best to use as the canonical version?

http://www.hylunia.com/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution 
or http://www.hylunia.com/products/face-care/facial-moisturizers/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution ?

I'm leaning on the latter, because it makes sense to me to have the breadcrumbs match the url string, and also it seems having more keywords in the url would help. However, it's obviously a very long url, and there might be some benefits to using the shorter version that I'm not aware of.

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts.

Best,

Daniel

[NakulGoyal]

Based on what I see I would recommend you use this one: http://www.hylunia.com/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution Here are my reasons: 1. http://www.hylunia.com/products/face-care/facial-moisturizers/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution is way too long. 2. It 2 levels down in terms of folders. 3. You already have the category names in the Page Title as well as the Breadcrumbs, so you are not really missing out on the On-page by having the category names removed from the URL. That's just my 2c. I hope that helps.

[coremediadesign]

I agree with Nakul - your best bet here is the name of the product right after the domain name - clean, short and straight to the point.

I find the canonical urls especially useful when you need the parameters in the url in order to provide some functionality such as highlight the link in the navigation etc., but it doesn't really have much impact on the way the product is displayed - in this case I always use the shortest possible version of the url as the canonical.

Later, when you create your sitemap, make sure that you also use the shortest versions to be included in it - so that you stay consistent with your decision and make it clear to the search engines what version should be indexed.