Internal links to preferential pages

[Guy_OTS]

Hi all, I have question about internal linking and canonical tags.

I'm working on an ecommerce website which has migrated platform (shopify to magento) and the website design has been updated to a whole new look. Due to the switch to magento, the developers have managed to change the internal linking structure to product pages.

The old set up was that category pages (on urls domain.com/collections/brand-name) for each brand would link to products via the following url format: domain.com/products/product-name . This product url was the preferential version that duplicate product pages generated by shopify would have their canonical tags pointing to. This set up was working fine.

Now what's happened is that the category pages have been changed to link to products via dynamically generated urls based on the user journey. So products are now linked to via the following urls: domain.com/collection/brand-name/product-name . These new product pages have canonical tags pointing back to the original preferential urls (domain.com/products/product-name).

But this means that the preferential URLs for products are now NOT linked to anywhere on the website apart from within canonical tags and within the website's sitemap. I'm correct in thinking that this definitely isn't a good thing, right?

I've actually noticed Google starting to index the non-preferential versions of the product pages in addition to the preferential versions, so it looks like Google perhaps is ignoring the canonical tags as there are so many internal links pointing to non-preferential pages, and no on-site links to the actual preferential pages?

I've recommended to the developers that they change this back to how it was, where the preferential product pages (domain.com/products/product-name) were linked to from collection pages.

I just would like clarification from the Moz community that this is the right call to make? Since the migration to the new website & platform we've seen a decrease in search traffic, despite all redirects being set up. So I feel that technical issues like this can't be doing the website any favours at all.

If anyone could help out and let me know if what I suggested is correct then that would be excellent.

Thank you!

[DonnaDuncan]

Guy-OTS, is it possible the dynamic pages have conflicting noindex tags? That could be your problem.

[Guy_OTS]

My gut feeling with this was right - as none of the preferential pages were being linked to on-site, only in the xml site map and canonical tags, Google was getting pretty confused.

I made sure that products were linked to via their preferential url on-page, and the website's search visibility and organic traffic is now increasing again.

[DonnaDuncan]

Good to know. Thanks for closing the loop on this.