Canonicals for product pages - confused, anyone help?

[Coraltoes77]

I have an ecommerce website (built using Magento), and have just had the functionality extended to allow me to define my own canonical URLs.  Currently the URLs are www. domainname.com/product-name.html but I can now change this to www.domainname. com/product-category/product-name.html.  I was led to believe that this would be good for SEO.

However, I have since had conflicting advice - it's been suggested that any links across the website that link to domain/category/sub-category/product will pass weight and authority through to the specified canonical anyway.   Plus longer URLs are generally worse...

I'm confused. Is it worth changing them?  If so, would it be a bad thing to change all 700 canonical URLs at once?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

If the only reason for changing the canonicals now is to try to help your SEO then I would not jump in and change all 700 right away. Canonicals are used to indicate the preferred version of a page for google to index, they do not actually remove duplicate content pages  (see Dr Pete's detailed explanation here). Magento's default canonical structure is usually set to have product urls with no category in them to avoid the dup content issue which you get when the product is in multiple cats/sub cats at the same time. If this is not an issue for you and all products are only in one category, or you are happy for them to be indexed in a specific category then you could change the canonicals, but I would not think it would make a huge difference in rankings so would look at it more from a user's point of view. Does having the category in the url for any specific product make sense or help to define the product more? If yes then consider changing the canonical, but I would try it on a small subset of products first and monitor things for a while before changing them all.

Hope it helps!

[Dr-Pete]

I agree with Lynn, but I'm a little confused about the intent. If you create the new URLs with product categories in them, you'll need to move the old URLs somehow, such as with 301-redirects. The new canonical tags won't help those old URLs, so you're potentially creating even more duplicate content by creating a new canonical version.

Generally, I don't think adding categories to the URLs is a great idea. You can squeeze in a few more keywords, but the impact of that in 2013 is very small. As you said, you're also making the URLs longer and you're pushing back the unique keywords. So, Google is going to see more repetition toward the beginning of the URL and less unique information (as are users, although most people don't read URLs closely, IMO).