Crawl Budget vs Canonical

[Highland]

Got a debate raging here and I figured I'd ask for opinions. We have our websites structured as

site/category/product

This is fine for URL keywords, etc. We also use this for breadcrumbs. The problem is that we have multiple categories into which a category fits. So "product" could also be at

site/cat1/product
site/cat2/product
site/cat3/product

Obviously this produces duplicate content. There's no reason why it couldn't live under 1 URL  but it would take some time and effort to do so (time we don't necessarily have). As such, we're applying the canonical band-aid and calling it good. My problem is that I think this will still kill our crawl budget (this is not an insignificant number of pages we're talking about). In some cases the duplicate pages are bloating a site by 500%.

So what say you all? Do we just simply do canonical and call it good or do we need to take into account the crawl budget and actually remove the duplicate pages. Or am I totally off base and canonical solves the crawl budget issue as well?

[caseyhen]

Hi Highland,

I would defiantly work on making sure that your product only lives in one category.  The canonical tag is a nice little band-aid but it still fix the root of the problem.  I would suggest you can have it listed in many different categories but it only lives in one category at the product level.  So for instance:

It's displayed here

site/cat1
site/cat2
site/cat3

But it only displays product details at a url like this

site/category/product

I'm not a huge fan of having Google crawl 4 or 5 extra pages per product just to find a canonical tag when you could just spend the extra programming time to make it work correctly.

Casey

[elephantseo]

Another great way to go is to not put the category in the product URL. That was usually the best solution when I work on e-commerce sites.

[trentc]

agreed! we ran into the same problem with content (articles, etc). if you think of it in the same way as blog posts, they each have a unique URL, but with tags (i.e. categories) you are able to get them posted to the appropriate category landing pages.

have a somewhat related issue that i posted here