Canonical url for eshop, to do or not to do?

[donatasBart]

Hello everyone,

I'm having a headache right now in designing a url base for a eshop. I would be thankful for any suggestions.

Just to be clear about my problem, I'll be using this product example:
Product name: Product
Categories: Sale, Women
Brand: Superbrand

Basicly every name of product, category or brand will resolve as url, if I enter url:

• /product it will open Product page
• /superbrand it will open brand page
• /superbrand/product will open product page from superbrand page
• /superbrand/sale/product would open product page selected from superbrand, then category sales
• /superbrand/woman/product would open product page selected from superbrand, then category woman

So I will have many variations how to reach the product page, and of course i should set canonical url for it. I could set it just to /product , but then I don't know if I won't loose in terms of seo for other more detailed urls. Will google still index my other urls for product if i will state the canonical url in each product page?

I know, maybe it would be the best solution to create a link like this: /superbrand_sale_product , which I can, but however it will be a duplicate content issue, since there will me many url pointing to the same product, and the only difference between them will be category, brand or whatever else...

Thanks for all your ideas!

[TommyTan]

Hi Donatas,

The best practice will be use canonical tag pointing to one main product.  Whether you want everything to /product or /superbrand/product, so as long as you have the canonical in place, it will avoid the duplicate content issue.

I would suggest using a more simple url as the main canonical URL such as /superbrand/product instead of /superbrand/woman/product as keyword effectiveness in URL decreases as it gets longer.

Hope this answers your question.