What is the best practice for URLs for E-commerce products in multiple categories?

[Hatfish]

Hello all!

I have always worked successfully with SEO on E-commerce sites, however we are currently revamping an older site for a client and so I thought I'd turn to the community to ask what the best practices that you guys are experiencing for url structures at the moment.

Obviously we do not wish to create duplicate content and so the big question is, what would you guys do for the very best structure for URLs on an E-commerce site that has products in multiple categories?

Let's imagine we are selling toy cars. I have a sports car for sale, so naturally it can go in the sports cars category and it could also go in to the convertibles category too. What is the best way you have found recently that works and increases rankings, but does not create duplicate content?

Thanks in advance!

Kind Regards,

JDM

[Ray-pp]

Hi Hatfish,

If both categories are relevant and deserve their own areas, then put the products in both the hierarchies. Then, decide which heirarchy is the most important (from a SERPs perspective) and Canonical the product URL to a single URL.

Using your example:

The sports car category would be my main category. When you navigate to the Convertibles category you would be able to find that sports car. However, when visiting the product the URL would resolve to a single URL. So, if I was in the convertible category it would send me to the Sports Car hierarchy page (through a 301 redirect).

Make sure to identify 1 URL for canonical purposes

Make sure to 301 the subordinate URL to the main URL

This way the user can use both areas to navigate through your site and find the product they are looking for. But, as far as SEO is concerned there is only 1 main URL for each product.

[JMcKaye]

Use the rel=canonical tag so that all URL's would point to the 'end' toy car page - hence avoiding any duplicate content. If there isn't much content anyway, Google has said they actually wouldn't penalise for this.

I had a little look and found something slightly similar I guess here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/wFlGmPiQe5E

I'd def use Rel=Canonical though

Jamie

[LesleyPaone]

Does the platform you are using let you select a default category for the product? Several platforms will let you select multiple categories and make you chose one as a default category. If so, you can just work off the uri of the page and insert the default category as the canonical category in the rel=canonical.