Canonical Tag for Ecommerce Site

[DynoSaur]

I implemented a canonical tag on each product page for my clients ecommerce site and my rankings tanked. Has this happened to anyone else? If so, when can I expect rank to return?

[AlanBleiweiss]

a canonical tag on every product page? Pointing to a different page or pointing to themselves?  And what was the reason for doing so?

[DynoSaur]

On every product page.

Here's why: when a new product was added to the website it automatically gave it a url like this one, www.website.com/product/productname1234. And whenever it was added to a product category such as "corner desks," a new url and page were created, www.website.com/product/cornerdesks/productname1234. Google was indexing both (or all - in the case they were in multiple categories) thus creating almost 2,000 duplicate product pages.

We added the canonical tag at the end of April and didn't really see a drop in rank until this week.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Okay so to be sure, you simply set up canonical tags to point to your newly identified "proper" URL for each product, correct?

If so, given the lapse in time between the change and the drop, I would need to assume something else has happened.  Some other factor would need to be the cause, if your canonical implementation was executed properly and there's not a major flaw at the code level in the results.

While there is a slight chance it's tied to the canonical change even if that was done properly, I'd definitely look at other factors as well.

[DynoSaur]

Yes, they were set up site wide and point to the proper URL for each individual product.

[Dr-Pete]

It's always hard to speak in generalities, but my gut reaction is that Alan's right - if the canonical tags were implemented properly, having your rankings tank from this kind of implementation seems very unlikely. A couple of possibilities:

(1) Are your canonical URLs being used in internal links? If you tell Google that one version is canonical but then act as if another version is canonical, it can cause problems.

(2) Are you sending any other, conflicting cues, like 301-redirects or Webmaster Tools parameter handling?

(3) Is it possible that your canonicalization was too broad? In other words, did you end up de-indexing some product variations that were driving long-tail traffic? For example, let's say you had a product in red, blue and green and you canonicalized them all to the "root" product page. In theory, that might be a good thing, but if people were searching for specifics and you had a lot of long-tail rankings ("buy product in red"), then it could be bad.